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Fashioned as an \"anti-opera,\" Ligeti conceived the music for Le Grand Macabre as a kind of \"pop art,\" filled with quotations and references to opera and other preexisting musical genres. Examining the opera's thematic connections with the original play by Michel de Ghelderode and Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of grotesque realism, I suggest that Ligeti's parodic approach in this opera is governed by two narrative trajectories: the grotesque and existential irony. Drawing on writings by Robert Hatten, Linda Hutcheon, and Esti Sheinberg, this paper develops semiotic constructs of mapping, troping, and/or reversal in determining the parodic procedures invoked. I argue that, through such procedures, Ligeti engages with musical parody at two levels: the surface level at which quotation of existing music and musical styles are transformed and the global level at which an expressive opposition between ludicrousness and horror is established in articulating the grotesque trope. Furthermore, through deployment of collage and textural disintegration, Ligeti creates an aural counterpart to the allegorical depiction of chaos, destruction, and renewal found in Breughel's \"Triumph of Death.\"

This article discusses a group of pieces that can best be understood as musical collages: the third movement of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (1968), the first movement of George Rochberg's Music for the Magic Theater (1965), and the last movement of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Musique pour les Soupers du Roi Ubu (1966). It demonstrates that chromatic complementation and a concurrent systematic process of chromatic saturation provide the logic behind the harmonic, formal and voice-leading content of these pieces, thus establishing an unexpected link between these works and their serial predecessors.

By exploiting the multivalent implications attendant on principles of quotation, disjunction and juxtaposition, musical collage works of the 1960s, like their analogues in the visual arts and literature, call into question traditional notions of unity. However, these compositions also incorporate new modes of continuity which lend a distinctive expressive force to music of this kind. The present article outlines organisational precepts which composers including Luciano Berio, George Rochberg and Bernd Alois Zimmermann have used to achieve a degree of syntactic mediation: overlap, chromatic insertion and rhythmic plasticity. The common occurrence of these principles in works exhibiting widely divergent stylistic predispositions indicates that they may constitute important technical aspects of this particular repertoire.

Of all recent art music styles, few have relied upon technological developments for their composition, performance and recording to the same degree as minimalism. In both the output of the principal composers of the more recent minimalist canon (namely in the objet trouvé works of Reich and Adams, the film scores by Glass and Nyman as well as through the reliance on electronic amplification common to them all) and in the counter-cultural movements characterized by music whose content is absolutely dependent on electronic media, repetitive styles have been transformed. The sophistication of these procedures has naturally resulted in a diminished sense of human labour within the compositional process and, at times, the total loss of a composer's authorial voice. The tintinnabuli music of Arvo Pärt stands out against the general tendency of such repetitive-based composers to harness the latest technology, to the extent that some commentators have baulked at the term ‘minimalist’ as an appropriate category. Robert Schwarz, for example, believes ‘neo-medievalist’ to capture something of Pärt's particular adoption of a supposedly pre-modern, non-technological attitude, while Josiah Fisk opts for the ‘new simplicity’ to describe (negatively) Pärt's monochromaticsm.