Abstract
This article investigates the musical form, rhythm, and pitch set relations in György Ligeti’s Etude for Piano No.8 “Fém”. It is argued that the piece incorporates sonic clues and semantic allusions to the West African bell music. Moreover, Ligeti’s piece showcases direct parallels with the strategies associated with African musical traditions, such as superimposing different rhythmic cycles. The formal units of the composition are organized around what Arom (1991) defines as macroperiods that are obtained by the combination of multiple rhythmic cycles. The composition makes abundant use of melodic cells derived from set classes (025) and (035), which are related to pentatonic scales commonly found in African music. It is argued that Ligeti’s composition showcases the Bartókian techniques of inversional symmetry and transpositional combination in a rhythmical framework derived from African musical traditions.
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