Motherhood Quote by Gyorgy Ligeti

Ligeti’s line looks like casual shop talk, but it’s doing something slyer: it elevates a nursery-book phantom into a legitimate engine of modernism. By invoking Mother Goose in the same breath as Stravinsky, Ligeti collapses the artificial border between “high” composition and the supposedly innocent, disposable material of childhood. Not folk song in the ethnographic sense, not myth in the Wagnerian sense, but the blunt little jingles of the nursery: rhythmic, repetitive, slightly uncanny. That’s the point.

The phrasing matters. “Used” suggests craft, even opportunism; “was influenced” softens it into osmosis. Ligeti then lands on “indirectly,” a word that protects Stravinsky from the charge of naivete while also winking at the obviousness of the source. Great composers don’t copy; they metabolize. And “very beautifully” is both genuine admiration and a subtle corrective to critics who treat such sources as unserious. Beauty here isn’t prettiness; it’s the elegance of transformation.

Contextually, Ligeti is speaking as a postwar modernist who distrusted grand ideological programs in art. For him, the pre-modern, the childish, the “found” material becomes a way to smuggle clarity and play back into a century that often equated seriousness with austerity. Stravinsky’s genius, in Ligeti’s telling, is not purity but contamination: the ability to let a simple cultural artifact haunt sophisticated structures. Mother Goose becomes a kind of Trojan horse for rhythm, irony, and memory.