Many words have been written on the subject of symmetry in Bartók, prompted by the abundance and variety of examples of the phenomenon to be found on the music's ‘surface’. As yet, however, the fundamental stasis of symmetry and the dynamism for which Bartók's music is noted have not been adequately reconciled, irrespective of what kind of symmetry has been examined – spatial, formal, or pitch-class. One of the problems regarding work in the first of these categories has been that analysts have tended to examine excerpts rather than complete spans of music. Thus while Jonathan Bernard proposes that there is in Bartók a ‘hierarchy of relationships in which smaller symmetries contribute to larger ones, which in turn contribute to even larger ones, and so on, across ever larger spans of time’ – a theory which has the potential, at least, to account for dynamic aspects of the music – his concern only with incomplete spans limits the effectiveness of his approach.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate, by examining György Ligeti's cycle of three pieces for double choir, what I call his compromise between temporal forms that possess their own microcosmic history and latent drama, and architectural patterns of his music that are endowed with a purely spatial coherence. I hope to demonstrate that an analysis of the aesthetic concepts at work in Ligeti's pieces might lead to a somewhat non-traditional approach in elaborating analytical strategies of modern music.

George Nicholson (b.1949) is one of the generation of composers who emerged in the early 1970s from York University, where he read Music and English. He studied composition under Bernard Rands and, after a period of school teaching, returned to undertake postgraduate composition studies with David Blake, gaining a PhD in 1979. The earliest influence on his work, and probably the most significant in terms of musical philosophy, was Henri Pousseur. Like Pousseur, Nicholson has looked to Schoenberg for a means of finding a path toward a synthesis of old and new, and an awareness of his position in the wider context of musical history.