At the turn of the twentieth century, Gyorgy Ligeti’s late piano music was performed in various European concert halls alongside music of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa. The acclaimed project culminated in a CD on the Teldec label entitled Ligeti/Reich: African rhythms (Pierre Laurent Aimard/Aka Pygmies) featuring works by Ligeti, alongside works by Steve Reich and music of the Aka. The article describes and evaluates the uneven critical reception of the project in relation to the precise formal connections between Ligeti’s etudes, on the one hand, and the music of Aka, in particular, and African music, in general, on the other. Some of the African citations in Ligeti’s etudes are traced to specific source materials, the original function and context of the music (even if they are not demonstrably known by the composer) is briefly described, and the ideological dimenstions implicit in the way African materials are put to use in a Western context are assessed.
Wagner Redux: Badiou on Music for the Future
Alain Badiou’s book Five lessons on Wagner contests and revises the widespread critical reception of Richard Wagner. Badiou offers a counterpoint to 6 charges made against the composer: (1) Wagner created seductively sensual musical edifices; (2) Wagner indulges identitarian thought; (3) Wagner spectacularizes suffering; (4) Wagner’s musical forms contain differences in a false unity; (5) Wagner theatricalizes the drama; and (6) Wagner’s temporalities are underwritten by the latent telos of affirmative dialectics. Badiou argues against these charges point by point. Badiou then shifts attention away from plot structures and toward the music’s formal protocols. For Badiou, musicalized transitions proffer vectors for transformation beyond the conceptual scope of plot meanings alone. The paper describes and evaluates Badiou’s claims. Using Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as a central referent, the paper argues that Badiou unwittingly construes music as a signifying medium at argumentatively crucial junctures, which permits an equivocal case of Wagner to persist.