Convergences and Discord in the Correspondence between Ligeti and Adorno

Abstract

During the 1960s Gyorgy Ligeti engaged with Theodor W. Adorno in public discussions and private correspondence, most significantly on ideas presented by Adorno in the lecture ‘Vers une musique informelle’ and developed further in ‘Difficulties’. Their previously unpublished letter correspondence provides a basis from which to examine their interaction, and casts new light on the level of Ligeti’s engagement with Adorno’s musical aesthetics. The study of the interaction between Ligeti and Adorno seeks to address recent calls for investigation into the range and nature of Adorno’s influence on composers and their poetics. Moreover, the implications of Ligeti’s contribution in response to Adorno, particularly in matters of musical form, are of potential significance to the broader analytical and aesthetic discourses on a wide range of repertories and genres to emerge in the late twentieth century.