Many people say: Art must be true. I believe the opposite: Art is allowed to lie. Art has to simulate something that does not exist.
György Ligeti, 1960

Vocal music is a central component of György Ligeti's oeuvre. He not only set poems to music but also used his own texts or sound material in his compositions. Already in the tape piece Artikulation, he sought to arouse linguistic associations. Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures use phonemes without specific meaning as raw material for a fictional language.
Their emotional scope, which ranges from sighs to screams, is nevertheless reminiscent of human communication. Ligeti was also fascinated by nonsense poetry, such as Lewis Carroll's texts, which he set to music for the King's Singers in the Nonsense Madrigals. He felt particularly drawn to the poetry of Sándor Weöres, whose poems he already set to music in his early years in Hungary. In his last completed work, Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel (With pipes, drums, fiddles), he returned to Weöres.