Scholars have struggled to reconcile the expressive immediacy of Witold Lutosławski's works with his claims that he wrote absolute music. This article seeks a more nuanced understanding of the place of abstraction in Lutosławski's creative practice by exploring connections between his 1981 speeches on artistic ethics and his approach to melodic construction in Chain 2 (1984–5). Lutosławski's words and music both rely on convention, and recycle rhetoric from his past. But these are not their only correspondences. They also engage with a trio of concepts – withdrawal, integrity, and autonomy – that are at the heart of a moral code Lutosławski articulated in response to the volatile political conditions of 1980s Poland. The article thus sheds new light on the entanglement of modernism, ethics, and politics in the late twentieth century, while illuminating what the idea of abstraction may have meant in a particular time and place.

György Ligeti has stated that his micropolyphonic compositions were ‘governed by rules as strict as Palestrina's’ (Ligeti 1983, 14); some of these rules are preserved directly in his sketches and others can be derived from the compositions themselves. This article discusses the artistic context in which Ligeti developed systems of rules for individual compositions, and investigates in depth the composer's rules for the organization of pitch and rhythm in two of his seminal works from the 1960s, transmitting the explicit rules for pitch in sketches for the ‘De die judicii’ movement of the Requiem and uncovering implicit rules for rhythm in Lux aeterna. By examining both the rules and their application in composition, with the exceptions that arise therein, we come to a better understanding of the aesthetic goals Ligeti's rules were devised to meet, and the balance of stricture and freedom that was essential to the composer's persona.

Instead of using Milton's famous opening lines, librettist Christopher Fry begins the text for Krzysztof Penderecki's opera Paradise Lost with the invocation that opens Book III, which alludes to acts of creation both biblical and literary. While the primordial effects of Penderecki's instrumental introduction to the opera parallel this allusion in easily discernible ways, his melodic lines used within this introduction also parallel this allusion in ways understood using recent theoretical perspectives on the composer's neo-Romantic style. These melodies exhibit a rare feature of paradoxicality, in that they are at once finite and infinite within stylistic constraints. This musical paradox corresponds to notions of paradox in accounts of cosmological creation, in a literary-operatic creation in which the author is character, and in the hypostatic union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ, a union foregrounded more in Fry's and Penderecki's opera than in Milton's original poem.

In John Corigliano's and William Hoffman's opera The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), generic, musical, and temporal boundaries are dissolved, and historical processes revealed, resulting in a work that performs an operatic rendering of what philosopher Frank Ankersmit has referred to as sublime historical experience. As Marie Antoinette's ghost resolves her trauma by narrativising it in performance, and as music extends and dramatises the experience of the sublime, the audience experiences profoundly the liminal realm that historically-based operas inhabit in their movement between past and present. Indeed, the temporal suspension that is so central to theories of the sublime finds parallels in opera's historical obsession with death, and in music's ability to momentarily blur the boundaries between life and death, and past and present. The Ghosts of Versailles allows for the audience's relationship to history to be revisited, reconfigured, and in many cases, reconciled, through a haunting of the present in operatic performance.