2025/10/10 by Joseph Cadagin
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Allusion #Diverse Musicological Studies #Diversity and Impact of Dance #Identity (music) #Irish #MAGIC (telescope) #Metaphor #Musicology and Musical Analysis #Nonsense #Poetry
paper · doi:10.1093/ml/gcaf144
published in Music and Letters (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2025/10/10 · openalex created_date 2026/07/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/24
ABSTRACT In his 2000 song cycle Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel for mezzo and percussion, György Ligeti conjures up a childhood fantasy that interacts with his identity as a Hungarian exile. The work comprises seven eccentric settings of nonsense poems by the composer’s friend and compatriot Sándor Weöres. Its title, however, is lifted from a traditional nursery song in which a child heals a wounded stork ‘with pipe, drum, reed fiddle’—an allusion that anthropologists have interpreted as a vestige of curative magic from the Magyar people’s mythic shamanic past. Informed by manuscript sources and concepts from nostalgia studies and music therapy, it is argued that Ligeti’s re-engagement with Hungarian folk idioms in Síppal, dobbal enacts an analogous process of emotional healing.