著者

奥村 京子

出版者

美学会

雑誌

美学 = Aesthetics (ISSN:05200962)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.64, no.1, pp.83-94, 2013

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During the period 1988-1993, Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006) composed the Nonsense Madrigals, which included six tunes for six male voices. For the text of the final tune, "A Long, Sad Tale," Ligeti borrowed from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865) and his word game doublets. This paper discusses the musical structure of "A Long, Sad Tale." In the tune, Ligeti combined pulsative word-patterns of four doublets, the howling voice of the Queen of Hearts, a conversational sentence between Alice and the mouse, and a trial tale of a violent dog against the whining mouse. He highlighted the personalities of the characters, and set the text in multiple voices to create an emotional polyphony. Moreover, he created not only an elastic metrical structure in a manner through which all kinds of time signatures frequently change but also a jigsaw puzzle-like structure that was based on multiples of sixteen.