"I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided"
About this Quote
Ligeti’s line sounds like a shrug, but it’s really a manifesto for how he thought composition should work: music first, language later, if at all. He’s sketching a hierarchy of certainty. The “music” arrives as an internal architecture he can already hear and trust. “The words” are a negotiable surface, a label that can mislead, corral, or domesticate what the sound is doing.
Coming from a composer who escaped postwar Hungary and spent a career side-eyeing authority, the subtext is political as much as aesthetic. Words are where regimes do their tidying: slogans, censored programs, approved narratives. Instrumental music, especially Ligeti’s swirling, cloudlike textures, is harder to police because it refuses to resolve into a single, quotable meaning. He’s not claiming music is purer; he’s admitting it’s freer. You can’t easily turn micropolyphony into a party line.
It also reads as a jab at the listener’s need for explanation. Modern music is perpetually asked to provide its “aboutness” to earn permission to exist. Ligeti flips that demand: the sound is non-negotiable; the story is optional. The remark hints at his precision, too. He wasn’t an anti-intellectual mystic. He was a craftsperson who could precompose dense structures, then decide later how much he wanted to guide the audience’s imagination with titles, texts, or program notes.
The wit is in the quiet confidence: the hard part is done. The part that makes people comfortable can wait.
Coming from a composer who escaped postwar Hungary and spent a career side-eyeing authority, the subtext is political as much as aesthetic. Words are where regimes do their tidying: slogans, censored programs, approved narratives. Instrumental music, especially Ligeti’s swirling, cloudlike textures, is harder to police because it refuses to resolve into a single, quotable meaning. He’s not claiming music is purer; he’s admitting it’s freer. You can’t easily turn micropolyphony into a party line.
It also reads as a jab at the listener’s need for explanation. Modern music is perpetually asked to provide its “aboutness” to earn permission to exist. Ligeti flips that demand: the sound is non-negotiable; the story is optional. The remark hints at his precision, too. He wasn’t an anti-intellectual mystic. He was a craftsperson who could precompose dense structures, then decide later how much he wanted to guide the audience’s imagination with titles, texts, or program notes.
The wit is in the quiet confidence: the hard part is done. The part that makes people comfortable can wait.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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