Musicology lecture with Joe Cadagin, “Music, Magic, and Migration: György Ligeti’s “Síppal, dobbal” as Sonic Healing," Dec. 7

Please join us Thursday, Dec. 7 at 4pm in the CAC first floor conference room for musicologist and opera scholar Joe Cadagin.

“Music, Magic, and Migration: György Ligeti’s “Síppal, dobbal” as Sonic Healing"

In his 2000 song cycle Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel for mezzo and percussion, György Ligeti conjures a colorful childhood fantasy that covertly interacts with his identity as a Hungarian exile. The title is taken from a nursery rhyme in which a child heals a stork “with pipe, drum, and reed fiddle.” Anthropologists have hypothesized that this reference to curative noisemakers preserves the vestiges of ancient shamanic healing practices from Hungary’s pre-Christian past. Drawing on archival research and concepts from nostalgia studies and music therapy, this paper argues that Síppal, dobbal enacts an analogous process of emotional healing for the composer.

Acknowledging the irrevocability of the past, Ligeti replaces the rhymes of his youth with “counterfeits” by his friend and compatriot, poet Sándor Weöres. His whimsical settings of seven nonsense verses are indebted to Hungarian musical traditions, including juvenile repertoire, magical winter-solstice chants, and the folksongs of his native Transylvania. At the same time, the composer indirectly addresses his life as a perpetual foreigner, allying his experiences with the collective trauma of an imagined immigrant community depicted in two Chinese-themed numbers. Ligeti’s nostalgic visions of childhood constitute a musical balm for this pain—a means of integrating his identity through a process resembling songwriting techniques advocated by music therapists. My analysis of manuscript sources for Síppal, dobbal also suggests that the cycle’s eccentric instrumentation evokes strains of sonic folk medicine, including the healing drums and ocarinas of Hungarian shamanic myth.

Photo: © Illustration by Don Aldridge in Sándor Weöres, "If All the World Were a Blackbird", trans. Alexander Fenton (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1985)

Joe Cadagin is a musicologist and opera journalist, recently based as a postdoctoral fellow at New Europe College, Bucharest, and at the University of Toronto. He received his doctorate from Stanford University in 2020, with a dissertation on Ligeti’s Nonsense Madrigals supported by a Fulbright grant to Hungary. His current research on Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel is part of a larger monograph project examining strains of childhood nostalgia in Ligeti’s late works. His forthcoming article “Ligeti’s Unfinished Alice in Wonderland” will appear next year in Perspectives of New Music. He was a regular critic and features writer for Opera News and continues to review contemporary opera on recording for OperaWire and San Francisco Classical Voice.

For more information on Joe's talk, please see this introductory video, and for more on his opera writing, his website.