Resisting Closure: The Passacaglia Finale from György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre

Abstract

The Passacaglia finale from György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974–7, rev. 1996) has been described as a point of stylistic crisis, marking Ligeti's return to more traditional compositional means. Consonances and tonal allusions in the music are regarded as indicative of this retrospective tendency. However, notions of functional hierarchy or even pitch centres do little to explicate the underlying processes that contribute to the sense of perpetual unfurling in the Passacaglia. Contained within the resistance to tonal teleology is a process of differentiation in the pitch material. In this respect, the Passacaglia might be considered a further development in Ligeti's continuing effort to inject process into musical material, albeit with increasing levels of intervallic transparency. I further substantiate this argument by situating the analytical findings in this article in a historical context. The final version of this research has been published in Music Analysis. © 2015 Wiley