Ligeti‘s Life and Music

hello everyone in this video i'm going to talk about the life and music of ligeti who is one of my favorite composers [Music] i will give you some biographical informations but most of all introduce you to many of his pieces starting from the very early works all the way to the last ones you wrote and hopefully i will make you curious enough that you will listen to ligeti's music afterwards this video also serves as an introduction to a more detailed analysis video about one of ligety's pieces that i'm going to upload soon so if you don't want to miss that consider subscribing to my channel and now let's get started ligeti was born in 1923 in transylvania which was part of romania and his parents were hungarian jews he lived his first years in a beautiful little town with only 5 000 inhabitants in the region of ziebenbergen it was very idyllic except that there were various large factories disturbing this countryside and this brings us to one of five musical or sound experiences of ligety's early childhood which i briefly want to mention so firstly ligeti would often hear the noises of those factories and machines working this was maybe the the root of his fascination for mechanical objects that he would later develop and that we will see in some of his pieces it was reinforced by the strong impression he had as a kid when he read the story of hungarian author khudi in which a woman is left alone for years in her house with many many clocks and other ticking objects secondly there were a lot of gypsy bands in the village who played on many occasions ligeti would often hear their low baselines while trying to fall asleep thirdly his mother would often sing hungarian folk songs and in addition to that legate would often hear traditional romanian mornings or kind of lamenting the lament would become a very important part of his music fourthly the music that he heard at church ligeti was very impressed and even scared of the church's big architecture the massive organ sound and everything related to sin death and hell this initial fear would preoccupy him all his life he even said that his fascination for rick vms or for paintings of the last judgment stem from that early experience the theme of death would actually become quite important for ligety since he would so often come very close to it we will talk about this in a minute now maybe to the most important musical experience soon legate's family bought a gramophone which became the new attraction at home for him he listened to mozart beethoven schubert fitzroy piano music of chopin liszt greek and even some wagner when ligeti was a bit older his family moved to a larger city he would often have a hard time at school there many jewish kids would get beaten up there was already a lot of anti-semitism around but in this new city he had the possibility to go to many concerts operas buy more records and listen to more and more music at that time when he was around 14 years old he convinced his father to get piano lessons because his little brother started taking violin lessons soon they would play chamber music together as legate started playing the piano he immediately started writing his first own compositions he imagined music in his head all day filling sketchbook after sketchbook with musical ideas he remembers that his very first pieces were little piano pieces in the style of greek he made fast progress at the piano and played all the classics like bach heiden mozart schumann greek and so on notwithstanding the fact that he didn't have a piano at home and always had to go to friends of the family to practice soon he would try to practice his piano pieces as quickly as possible to then have more time left for composing and trying things out on the piano legety quickly started writing pieces for other instruments too for flute string quartet or even for orchestra after hearing massive orchestral music of richard strauss or wagner on the radio and being very impressed by them all of the pieces from that time have a romantic touch to them and ligety said that it was in this period that his obsession with western classical musical tradition had begun despite all of that at that time ligety wanted to become a scientist in fact he was not only very good at music but also in physics and mathematics and in addition to that he was just enormously awake and creative to give you an example of his overflowing imagination at that time ligeti invented an imaginary country called kilviria he drew a gigantic map of it and even invented a language for the inhabitants of that country he always had an amazing fantasy and had all kinds of interests apart from music math and physics he was interested in chemistry cinema cartoons literature and so on he also learned a lot of languages apart from hungarian he had to learn romanian german french and to that would come many other languages during his life when he was 17 he started playing timpani in an orchestra which allowed him to get some experience as a practicing musician and to to know some orchestral pieces from the inside now these were the 1930s during which hitler was gaining power and anti-semitism was increasing in many european countries including hungary it was a very difficult time for ligeti and his family there were a lot of restrictions for jews one of them was that only one or two jews were allowed to go to university to study physics and maths and had to have excellent grades ligety applied and had excellent grades but he didn't make it fortunately for us he then decided to study composition and music theory at the conservatory of his town although who knows what he would have discovered as a physicist music theory was quite new to him he had very little knowledge and was mostly accepted because of his good hearing and because he had written so many pieces already during this time he studied with ference vargas who was a very good but rather conservative teacher and ligeti learned everything about traditional harmony instrumentation counterpoint and became very good at copying styles of great composers like bach haydn mozart and so on the most modern music that he studied at the time was that of stravinsky or paul hindemith which he looked at privately and of course the music of bartok was present for every hungarian composer as well as kodalis in addition to that ligeti learned lots of instruments he started singing in a choir and learned the organ and the cello in parallel to these intense musical studies ligeti basically studied physics and maths at a private school for jews and obviously music maths and physics are extremely time consuming and extremely demanding fields so ligety slept very little he even took some performance enhancing drugs this lifestyle led to a mental breakdown which he had to cure with a psychiatrist treatment and afterwards he decided to only study music unfortunately ligeti's studies were interrupted because he had to go to a labor camp this was in 1944 and the political situation had of course drastically changed many many jews were deported and killed among them was ligety's father his little brother his uncle and his aunt who were all very close to him ligeiti himself was not killed because of pure luck he and some other young jewish men were transferred to another labor camp where he was able to escape everything happened really quickly in summer 1944 everything changed again because of the soviet offensive in hungary legally wasn't treated any better by the russians and was taken prisoner but again he was very lucky to have been able to escape and to survive he then regained his hometown which was now part of romania which was allied to russia the romanian army immediately called him up to fight against the germans but he fell ill of tuberculosis and had to be hospitalized for three months when he was cured the war was over so again he was very lucky who knows if he would have survived in the army this short period of time was of course catastrophic and marking for ligety he witnessed a lot of terrible atrocities and lost everything except his mother after this nightmarish period ligeti continued composing and wanted to enter the prestigious conservatory of budapest where the important hungarian idol bartok had studied he applied hoping that he would study with bartok who was supposed to come back from the united states to become a professor in budapest the day ligeti went to do his entrance exam there was a black flag waving on top of the academy it was a sign that bartok had just died in new york this was of course very sad for everyone but on the happier side ligety succeeded at the entrance exam and joined the composition class of shando verse who was a great teacher these were again very traditional musical studies ligeti studied renaissance music baroque music classical and romantic music etc he was really obsessed with western classical music tradition and wanted to know everything about it and learn all the old techniques in addition to that came the studies of hungarian and romanian folk music but it was a rather conservative environment like i said the most modern music was bartok really and it didn't go any farther than that at that time ligety wanted to write music with high aesthetic value that was accessible at the same time he was interested in folk music elements in extended tonality and modality but wanted to write rather digestible music this was partly linked to his socialist political views which he got mostly from his father and his entourage the first years were difficult because the city was destroyed by the war and many people were living in very bad conditions including legacy at the same time there was a sort of revival flourishment of the cultures and there were lots of concerts for example but this was rather short-lived because in 1948 a stalinist dictatorship was installed in hungary among many terrible things there now was censorship ruling the cultural landscape for artists of course this was fatal many painters authors and musicians were forbidden picasso paul clay or music debussy schoenberg stravinsky and even some of the more extreme pieces of the hungarian hero bartok were forbidden the soviets wanted to get rid of any music that was influenced by the west or degenerate music as they called it while the political situation was worsening continuously ligeity finished his studies in 1949. only a few months later with the help of kodali who appreciated legacy he got a job as a counterpoint and harmony teacher at the academy which he kept until 1956. according to himself he was a very perfectionist and pedantic teacher at the time during this period legate's career as a composer was kind of divided on the one hand he wrote very accessible music he did arrangements of older music or of fork tunes and even did some purpose music and wrote pieces for school orchestras for example these were the pieces that were known to the public on the other hand he privately wrote more experimental more modern and more personal music you weren't allowed to write such things so these pieces were like his little secrets but this overall situation was of course very frustrating for an artist now let's start talking about compositions so ligeti at that time was writing lots of vocal pieces often using modern hungarian poetry the hungarian vocal and choral culture is very rich and ligety assimilated all of that plus of course the renaissance baroque and classical tradition these early pieces of his often have a nostalgic touch to them they had good simple melodies were often quite repetitive and rhythmical the harmonies were rather consonant and often mortal and so his rather innocent style became more and more exploratory and personal legacy also wrote a lot of instrumental music and often wrote pieces referring to classical music calling them sonata invention capricio and so on one example is his invention for piano in which you can hear the influences of hungarian music and baroque music bartok and bach in particular [Music] do [Music] another example is his cello sonata of which the capricious paganini influenced second movement was prohibited because it had modernist tendencies [Music] it was very difficult for young composers because every piece you wrote was controlled by an established composer's union before being published and they were extremely conservative so everything that was slightly adventurous was banned another thing worth mentioning is that already at that time ligeti was very interested in music of other cultures and this fascination would last his entire life now ligety wasn't very satisfied with most of his compositions and at one point he decided that he wanted a change he felt trapped in this classical romantic tradition and mostly in this bartok language which influenced every hungarian composer and he just didn't know anything newer than bartok and stravinsky really to liberate himself and to find his own style he attempted to strip down his music to its most essential its most basic elements the result of that attempt is maybe the first really significant work of ligeti it's musica richard cutter musical jakarta is a piano cycle consisting of 11 pieces in which legacy tried to build up his music from basically nothing to see what he could do with minimal material the constraint that he said himself is that the first piece would start with one note to which the second note is added at the end the second piece would start with two notes to which a third one is added the third one with three notes and then the fourth one is added and so forth so at the end in the eleventh piece he ends up with all the twelve chromatic pitches to make music with such limited pitch material you have to play with the other musical parameters like register dynamics articulation and also the amount of voices and of course rhythm it's really interesting to see how creative legacy got with this self-imposed restriction these are 11 compelling pieces and each one is different and has its own character there's a lament a fugue a bartok ish piece more folk music oriented ones there's strange walls etc etc so you still see where league team is coming from so classical music tradition and folk music tradition but one can already see some typical legacy things for example the lament or the outburst moments with indications like as if mad in the score like in piece 10. or the repeated figure the ostinato in the seventh piece [Music] the second piece is a plaintiff chant lament on two notes it consists of only two notes one semitone apart to which the third one is added to create variety and suspense legacy uses all musical parameters in addition to the pitches that are fixed so for example at the beginning he starts with this one voice in middle register in forte playing the two note melody with different articulations this melody is varied and then he switches to pianissimo with dampening pedal we have octaves in both hands in extreme registers and in legato later he brings in a larger leap in the melody accentuated by his forzato which immediately has an expressive effect of exclamation [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Music] do [Music] and later the entrance of the new pitch is very dramatically staged [Music] [Music] these changes of register dynamics and articulation are really crucial to this kind of music stanley kubrick actually used this piece in his movie ice white chat in very important scenes he also used other pieces of legate in other movies of his [Music] similar dark lament pieces are the fifth one or the ninth one which is dedicated to bartok whom legacy obviously owes a lot in this piano cycle his influence is still very recognizable [Music] [Music] so [Music] the final piece which is finally using all the 12 chromatic pitches is a richer car which is a type of composition dating from the late renaissance and early baroque period there were many types of richard cars but in this case legacy refers to a type of fugue more specifically to a chromatic view by italian early baroque composer fresco [Music] baldi [Music] [Music] the czech refuge were often of serious character and used many elaborated contrapuntal techniques legacy 2 uses all of these so he uses augmentations where the theme gets longer the note values get longer or diminution which is the opposite he uses inversions retrogrades etc [Music] ligeti said that this last piece was kind of a parody of scholastic fuke writing and all of its techniques but at the same time it's a grand and serious peace this combination of irony and seriousness is very typical of legit richard means searching in italian so with the title musica ligity refers to his own search for a personal musical language and at the same time in a sense it's a search for all the chromatic pitches and he ends the cycle with this richard car where all the 12 chromatic pitches are finally found so to say later in his life ligety kind of dismissed these pieces and actually everything he wrote in hungary calling them naive inadequate and half-baked but at some moment he acknowledged some some quality to them and he once referred to his style in hungary as prehistoric legacy it's also interesting to note that legate was almost 30 when he wrote these piano pieces when his contemporary composer carl henstockhausen was around the same age he wrote his clavierstek which in comparison are much more forward-looking [Music] or pierre boulez wrote his notation for piano when he was 20. of course ligetin knew nothing about these new compositions because of the censorship in the stalinist dictatorship he didn't even know the composers of the earlier generation like wieben who influenced these younger ones this was of course very restraining ligety continued composing and searching for a new language he wrote several pieces which like i said were often private projects among these the most important one is his first string quartet with the morphos nocturne of 1954. it was maybe the most original piece he wrote until then and was much freer than his earlier works [Music] you still hear the bartok influence in the intense chromatic melodies the harmony the counterpoint etc but some legacy characteristics already shine through like the outburst moments or the very strong gestures and the many small contrasting sections succeeding each other rapidly in these ways it actually reminds me a lot of his second string quartet which he wrote many years later the small succeeding sections are actually a form he would use in his works throughout his life up until his very late works like the humboldt concerto at the end of metamorpho's nocturne there's even an interwoven flashlight texture which is a premonition of the texture-based compositions ligeti would write later in his life [Music] in this section too there is irony and seriousness present simultaneously the cello has to imitate the violin ironically playing the motif that is the main cell for this whole piece it's as if the cello was mocking this motif we now heard a hundred times and also the lyricism of the violin but at the same time the overall texture is quite ethereal and just after this ironic part the cello place especially and leads towards the end which is not funny at all [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] after composing the string quartet ligeti wanted to be more radical to put away all the traditional musical elements to have no melody no rhythm no harmony and he wanted to start anew and focus on pure sound this attitude was partly due to political reasons ligeti was deeply affected by totalitarian regimes was deeply against them and was very concerned with the political and cultural state of his country one can understand why he wanted to write music that went completely against everything the regime would tolerate he started working on an orchestral piece called visions for which he imagined a static sound mass or field just pure colorful sound and this shimmering sound mass would mostly consist of clusters didn't know how to realize such a piece he didn't find the adequate technical means to compose it for example he didn't know how to make the different rhythms unperceivable or he didn't know how to lead every single voice and had difficulties writing such music with bar lines but we will see how he came about writing the music he envisioned later on this cluster writing he tried to use in this sketch was partially a consequence of him getting to know 12 tone music and wanting to write equally chromatic and modern music without using the same technique he was able to hear 12 toe music because of an amelioration of the political situation in 1955-56 during which the restrictions were east so ligeti was able to hear recordings and even to look at scores of the more modern music of bartok and also stravinsky schoenberg eibenberg and wieben he also discovered electronic music and being very interested in it he started writing many letters to composers of the west like stockhausen asking them many many questions and he was able to hear pieces like gazanga jungling on the radio [Music] [Music] oh [Music] unfortunately due to many events the political situation got worse again and the soviets reoccupied budapest and reimposed a totalitarian state a lot of people around 200 thousand decided to flee seeking the freedom they were so long deprived of ligety his wife vera and their son were among them and fled to austria the journey was extremely risky and once again ligeti was unbelievably lucky and escaped the police only by a pure chance plus the help of good people had made friends with some austrian and german people through his letters and was lucky to have the possibility to stay in vienna for a bit quickly meeting contemporary composers like friedrich serra this was of course a tremendously exciting change for ligety he was finally free and not culturally isolated anymore it was like a new beginning and he was eager to catch up on everything he had missed in hungary soon he left vienna for the pioneer electronic music studio in kern where he stayed for two years herbert aimart the founder and director of the electronic music studio in kern and carl henstockhausen helped legacy out by organizing a scholarship for him nevertheless he would still live in very poor conditions often having difficulties to sustain himself and his family at the time kern was full of artists and the city was really stimulating through stockhausen who let him stay at his place for a while and who always invited a lot of people legacy quickly got to meet many interesting people and joined this artistic circle stockhausen showed legacy a lot of music and scores they would often have very long discussions and conversations about music and other topics when legacy showed stockhausen his first string quartet with amber stockhausen said that there were only like two bars that he could accept which is kind of funny nowadays but in fact ligeti discarded every composition he wrote in hungary once he arrived in the west after hearing what music was being written here he found that his old pieces were way too old-fashioned he also got the chance to discover the possibilities of electronic music working in the studio with stockhausen and his colleague gottfried michelle kunich dignity composed a few electronic pieces one of them is called articulation in which he tried to create some sort of articulated speech-like music it uses a lot of synthesized sounds which often provoke associations i think one quote of his related to that piece is very interesting and important for ligate's compositions of course i have no liking for anything expressly illustrative or programmatic but that does not mean i defend myself against music that suggests associations on the contrary sounds and musical contexts continually bring to my mind the feeling of color consistency and visible or even tasteable form and on the other hand color form material quality and even abstract ideas involuntarily arousing me musical conceptions that explains the presence of so many extra musical features in my compositions sounding plants and masses which may succeed penetrate or mingle with one another floating networks that get torn up or entangled wet sticky gelatinous fibrous dry brittle granular and compact materials shred colicus splinters and traces of every sort imaginary buildings labyrinths inscriptions texts dialogues insect states events processes blendings transformations catastrophes disintegrations disappearances all these are elements of this non-purist music this was the first piece of legacy that was performed at the famous new music festival in darmstadt and actually stockhausen really liked it [Music] darmstadt was the place where the newest things were happening the freshest compositions were played and many new ideas and theories were discussed ligeti attended a lot of concerts and lectures met many important people and soon became a guests and himself being a very engaging lecturer legacy continued discovering new things he met and heard the music of mauritsukage john cage bernard alice zimmerman he discovered graphic and space time notation and many other things he also wrote articles about music one famous example being his analysis of boulez's structure for two pianos in which she deeply examined the piece and criticized or questioned some aspects of total serialism which was the leading strand of composition in western europe at the time serialism is basically a technique stemming from the 12th tone technique in which musical parameters like pitch dynamic articulation etc are ordered in a row he admired serial composers like bules or stockhausen but was skeptical of the technique at the same time and the analyses he made of serial music surely had an impact on his own musical thinking for example he recognized that in many serial compositions one doesn't perceive many details but rather larger units with specific textures to them one perceives different states of sound and that have different qualities he also became aware of the dangers of automatisms and music that one should not only stubbornly use a compositional technique but always pay attention to the perception of the listener in 1959 ligeti left the electronics studio because he felt that at the time the technologies were too limiting among many things ligety took from the electronics studio i want to mention two important ones the first one is the over layering of many many layers of sound on top of each other the second one is a kind of sound blurring which was linked to the tapes and machines that were used but also to human perception essentially when many pitches were played successively at very fast speed you wouldn't perceive the individual pitches but a blur of sound or a sound not rather than being melodic the pitches formed a knot and became more harmonic and textural and also they gained a specific sound quality ligeti now wanted to use everything he had learned in the electronic studio to create instrumental orchestral music in fact he wanted to realize the music he was imagining for years the the static music the pure colorful sound mass without melody harmony rhythms and was now able to do it he was opting for an orchestral sound mass a global sound in which the individual voices are eliminated this led him to compose apparition and atmosphere which were his first texture-based compositions and are real key works of his he was not the only one doing texture based compositions other composers such as penretsky xenarchus or stockhausen did similar things ligeti was almost 40 when he wrote those pieces and they were his first real success they seemed like a new and original approach to music especially after such a dominance of syria music which was getting more and more critique so atmosphere was a totally new piece for ligeti he finally found the radicalism he was searching for it was a real success and established him as a composer while before that he was rather taken seriously only as a music theorist the piece basically consists of a vast flowing mass of sound which changes its colors and its inner life all the time there is no pulse no meter no melody no real harmony no individual voices but just a stream of sound ligety once compared it to a river it's somehow simultaneously still standing and moving all the time the massive sound consists mainly of chromatic clusters the large opening one we just heard spanning almost 5 octaves with 59 notes this superposition of numerous layers of sound has its origins in his experience in the electronics studio like i said what's essential to this piece is the instrumental color what keeps it engaging are the different instrumental textures that are juxtaposed or emerging out of each other legacy really sculpts the sound math through time the instrumentation changes the dynamics change sometimes certain notes are played louder than others to differentiate the clusters and the cluster itself is expanded or contracted and so on the sound mass is also sometimes agitated from the inside like a big cloud that is animated from within to achieve that ligety developed micropolyphony which would become an important technique for his work it's a polyphony of many voices playing approximately the same line slightly out of sync and often at very fast speed the amount of voices the displacement between them the fast speed and often the very quiet dynamics make the polyphony imperceptible the individual lines get lost in an overall sound texture this technique was also influenced by legacy's work in the electronics studio and this blurring effect i talked about one example in atmosphere is a canon with 48 voices in the string section all the violins play the identical pitch sequence with individual rhythms and the violas and shelly play variations of that pitch sequence with different rhythms this creates a huge web and the density of it makes it impossible to hear the individual voices you perceive a global sound and the global texture that is agitated inside which is the goal of this technique [Music] so what's interesting is that in this piece basically everything becomes complex tone color all the musical elements like melody harmony and rhythm are not perceived as such but merged to contribute to the overall sound ligeti often said that he was fascinated and influenced by ocagam's polyphony which was half regulated half free as lighty saw it foreign but this piece was also influenced by passages in the music of beethoven brockner wc or schumbach's opus 60 number three which is also a composition based on orchestral colors [Music] [Music] a couple of years after atmosphere ligeti wrote a solo organ piece called volumina in which she explored a similar world of massive amorphous sound he somewhat transferred the cluster sound mass of the large orchestra to a solo instrument like atmosphere this piece consists of many clusters and begins with a huge one where the organist puts both his arms on the keyboard [Music] the various clusters in this piece are differentiated by the various tone colors of the organ or the registers by the span of the clusters and by the movement within them it was the first and only piece in which ligety used graphic notation so all the different clusters are represented by shapes lines blocks and so on you recognize the proportions between them and have a fixed approximate duration for the whole piece and for each page for example in atmosphere to create the complex micropolyphenic web textures ligeti wrote down every single instrumental line in volumina when he wants a similar effect so a cluster with moving agitated lines in it he writes this block filled with chaotic lines ligety used graphic notation because the details within these larger shapes are not so important it's all about the molding of larger masses of sound not the exact pitches and rhythms volumina is an impressive piece and i hope to hear it live one day so ligety had found this new texture-based approach to composition in which he sculpted masses of sound the music consisted of the same musical material which morphed from one state to another in a flowing or abrupt manner it went against tradition and lacked any figures motifs rhythms any real harmony or difference between foreground and background any graspable event really pieces like atmosphere are more like iridescent fields of sound for these kinds of compositions ligety used his experience in the electronics studio he developed his technique of macro polyphony he explored instrumental tone colors and of course thought about how to structure such pieces he would develop this type of continuous sound stream or sound field composition and wrote many pieces in that direction that we will look at later before that we have to look at a completely different side of legacy his work has many faces and in the 60s he was not only writing textual compositions [Music] many influences came to play during that period legality was influenced by cinema literature cartoons um dataism performance art happenings and many more things especially artists from the united states were expanding the horizon of art at the time the composer john cage played a big role in this but also lamont young the possibilities of composition were dramatically extended for example lamont young wrote a piece consisting only of a phrase saying draw a straight line and follow it john cage included everyday objects dance theater film painting and chance operations in his work the boundaries of compositions were brought there was also the fluxus movement focusing on performance art with namjoon pike being an important figure he did the most bizarre performances and was a friend of legit ligeti was of course perceiving all these new developments in arts and was welcoming the openness he did some compositions in that direction but they were rather ironical and quite funny his strawbergtell are a good example ligety was invited in fact by namjoon pike to write a piece for flux's festival the pc provided was the piano work the trabagate the first bugattire consists only of one note and in the other two there's only silence the score says not to play by a memory and there's even an encore you can play that consists only of the semi-quaver of paws another strange piece by ligati is his poem somfonique for 100 metronomes which was his last piece leaning towards fluxus like the title says in this piece lots of metronomes are activated successively and every single one of them has a different speed so you end up with this dense chaotic ticking liberty's fascination for mechanical things is maybe most apparent in this composition which is really machine music i said earlier that this obsession goes back to his childhood during which he read stories by hungarian author khudi in the works of khudi you find again and again a character a widow whose husband was either a botanist or a meteorologist and has been that for years one of the stories was about the widow living in a house full of clocks ticking away all the time the mechanical type music really originates from reading that story as a five-year-old on a hot summer afternoon this piece is also connected to ligety's idea of micropolyphony in this case rhythmical polyphony he overlays so many rhythmical layers that at the end you only perceive a global chaotic mess that really becomes a texture this brings up another fascination of ligate's polyrhythms which are basically different rhythmical structures going on at the same time in his later pieces ligity would often explore this superimposing of many rhythmical layers this poem safonique was rather important for legati because when he heard it it gave him ideas for machine inspired music for pieces like his second string quartet or continuum which we will discuss later of course this piece was also somewhat ironical and provocative so this was in 1962 one year later ligety would again compose a totally different piece exposing another side of him he was always reflecting on his own work and never wanted to settle with one thing he wanted to evolve and discover new things [Music] already in budapest ligeti was thinking about simulating speech with music in germany he talked with stockhausen about it and his electronic piece articulation was one first attempt but ligety wanted real performance he wanted the theatrical aspect of communication to be in the composition he developed his ideas and composed aventure for three singers and seven instrumentalists ligeity described it as a kind of opera with the unfolding adventures of imaginary characters on an imaginary stage this piece is the total opposite of his flowing sound mass compositions like atmosphere it's really theatrical music that is quickly and abruptly changing all the time the singers sing an imaginary nonsense language that legacy notated with the phonetic alphabet what's important is how this language is sound ligety provides a lot of verbal instructions and indicates if the singers should for example whisper or shout and how they should do it so aggressively or tenderly etc he indicates how the singers should inhale if they should address the audience or not and many more things the score is really full of verbal instructions legate described the form as very complicated five parallel streams of events as it were five stories that diverge from one another the form arises from the combining and intertwining of these streams each stream consists of a number of separated episodes 7 to 11 per stream and each episode has its own very distinctive expressive character mystical idyllic nostalgic funeral redeemed excited ironic erotic becomed humorous hypocritical cold indifferent triumphant pathetic stupid hysterical emotional startled fairy exalted anxious unrestrained mannered ornamental malicious etc etc so it's really a wild drama of emotions and also these very complex forms are often present in his works the instruments reinforce all these emotions echo the voices or sometimes create a counterpoint or even take the lead [Music] boys [Applause] oh because [Music] ligeti wrote a continuation of that piece called nouveas aventure some years later what i find compelling about these pieces is the amount of different feelings the ambiguity of expression that you get sometimes you don't know if the music is really funny or scary and in the next instant it's that serious or even lyrical and melancholic i also find it interesting that ligeti was so interested in creating an imaginary language and speech-like music i think this tells you a lot about how he thought about music in later pieces like the cello concerto the chamber concerto or the second string quartet the music still has all these expressive and dramatic qualities it doesn't matter if there are singers speaking an imaginary language or not his instrumental pieces are speaking just as much in between the compositions of aventura and nouvelles aventure ligeti composed his rigviem which is one of his major works and is just a huge piece it was premiered in stockholm in 1965 and left a very strong impression on everyone was always fascinated by the last judgement the fear of death and wanted to write a requiem for a long time he was influenced by dark disturbing surreal paintings of goya the triumph of death by peter bruegel or the garden of earthly delights by bosch in 1962 he began working on it but the complexity notably of the counterpoint took a very long time he finished the last movement the lagrimosa in 1965. it's an incredibly difficult piece to perform especially for the singers but ligety liked the dirtiness of intonation that was basically unavoidable and that could have a strong effect it was the first large-scale work that liga t wrote the requiem lasts about 30 minutes and combines all of the musical features he was working on there are cluster sound masses micro polyphonic textures wild successions of moments strong contrasts etc etc ligeti also took some inspiration from flemish polyphony and notably orca gems flowing polyphony that he admired so much but also bach for example and in any case ligeti was always steeped in western musical tradition was constantly studying scores and got a lot of inspiration and ideas from it an example of ligate's complex polyphony can be found in the second movement the kiria in which he uses again micro polyphony to create cannons which form a dense web of sound [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the frenetic third movement is much more chopped up and changes images all the time it's close to aventure a new vesa venture [Applause] oh [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] me [Music] the last movement the lagrimosa is really despairing haunting it's very slow and is again micro polyphonic [Music] me [Music] what's new in this last movement is that the micropolyphony is less dense so that some intervals and harmonies crystallize out of it it's much clearer ligety said referring to atmosphere i decidedly wanted to eliminate pitches later beginning with the requiem i began to reuse pitches when i finished the requiem i became aware that i had to distance myself from clusters in the last movement of the requiem the i made use of very clear intervals and that led me to a music like that of lux eterna the next year [Music] this brings us to look setena which is one of my favorite pieces of legacy and maybe the one i would recommend to listen to first to people who don't know his music it's really mesmerizing while writing this piece ligeti was very ill he had a perforated intestine and came very close to death while being treated at the hospital he became addicted to morphine and this addiction would last three years for a month legacy was high and in a dream-like state of mind he was so out of touch with reality that he wasn't even allowed to go out by himself but somehow he managed to compose which is quite astounding ligety said that luxatenna was psychedelic music composed in a drug-induced trance but it's not like look satana is a fuzzy muddle-headed composition quite the contrary it's a very clear pure sounding and well-constructed piece which shows how ligety started to explore harmony again as we saw in recent pieces he composed a lot with dense clusters which didn't really allow harmony now legate created these harmonic crystals that would emerge out of his polyphony this piece is also less chromatic than the previous ones it's again a flowing and streaming kind of music legacy starts out with one single pitch to which neighboring tones are added successively the harmony gets more dense and then tones are taken away again and so on so the harmony is really transforming itself progressively this is a procedure legacy would often use the entries of the different voices are almost unnoticeable and one is suddenly immersed in this beautiful sound world the overall texture is seductive and the different pitches coming in and out create all these beautiful intervals and [Music] harmonies [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] the flowing character of the piece is also due to the rhythmical independence of each voice there are no two voices doing the same rhythms so some always go in triplets the other ones in quintuplets others in quadruplets and so on almost nothing is sung vertically together but it's always one node changing here and then another node changing there it's almost always moving in that way so when something is finally sung together it has a very strong effect [Music] good [Music] [Music] this is all still part of liguity's micro polyphony technique many voices playing similar lines but not quite together and most of the time you can't really perceive individual lines there are often cannons like in many of his pieces he uses cannons to create these blurry sound textures later in the piece legate also plays with the different registers of the verses and with dynamics foreign [Music] the whole piece sounds magical and otherworldly or as legate writes in the score as from afar this brings us to this next piece called lontano which means distant or far away in italian it's again a big piece for a large orchestra in the lineage of atmosphere and other flowing sound mass compositions we talked about but as we just saw in the requiem or lux eterna ligeti refined his compositional techniques lontano has again no themes or rhythms etc but is one floating misty sound texture that transforms itself through time without a real incident happening the title has various meanings first of all it refers to the instrumentation which has many layers there are layers in the foreground and layers in the background so you have things that appear closer and other things that appear more distant dynamics and register play a big role in this this hierarchy changes continuously and as instruments that were in the background come forward it seems as though a sound appears from afar the texture changes and reveals elements that were hidden before [Music] the second thing is that behind those tumblr layers legity adds harmonic layers that are further away in a sense they are behind the timbrel layers lontano is a textural composition in which the instrumental colors are essential but as we saw ligati explored harmony more and more deeply which he also does in this piece he uses particular chords and the notes of these come with different instruments dynamics and registers so that certain pitches appear to be more in the foreground and others more in the background so again he has many layers and some pictures appear from far away and then disappear again and so on he has many tumblr layers and many harmonic layers one behind the other behind the other and so on [Applause] [Music] [Music] atmosphere was to a large extent grey it was colorful in the sense of tone color but harmonically gray in lontano on the other hand both tone color and harmony are colorful the third thing is that legacy makes subtle allusions to romantic orchestral music of mala or brokner for example never with quotations or anything like that but mostly the instrumentation of some passages makes you think that romanticism is emerging from afar [Music] in london ligity again uses micropolyphony and cannons and so on and in this case many of the individual lines are very expressive and lyrical almost like solo melodies and actually in lontana there are some little melodic figures shining through at some moments this indicates a change in ligety's work he wanted to somehow reintegrate melody in his compositions lontano is a very beautiful and maybe the most elaborate result of ligety's work on textural compositions on these shimmering flowing sound masses that change color continuously he enriches the timbral dimension by adding harmonic intervallic and melodic layers one final remark about the piece is that when i heard it for the first time i felt like something was missing in the sense that during most of the time i thought that something big was about to happen and it never came i had a constant feeling of longing later i found out that that was what legacy intended [Music] felt like that is one of the great qualities of it that you are constantly on the edge of your seat expecting some kind of eruption that never comes [Music] in the same year legacy wrote his cello concerto which is a work in two movements the first one being in the texture flowing music style of most pieces we talked about the second one being much more disjoint and nervous legacy described the work as a kind of avenger without words referring to his earlier piece movement one focuses again on tone color transformation and is again music that is somehow still standing and flowing at the same time it's more aesthetic than the previous pieces the sound transforms itself really slowly and delicately and everything is much more reduced [Music] [Music] [Music] yet there are still little disturbances especially towards the end and right before the ending there is a strong intensification and a climax really [Applause] somehow ligety always needed these buildups and intensification even in the seemingly most static pieces it begins once more with one single node around which the cluster is forming the first node is an e-natural in nine p's which is actually the quietest moment in ligate's catalog it is then passed around through various instruments and sound colors until new neighboring tones are added it's quite interesting that ligati would so often start a piece like this with one single pitch and that in a sense this goes all the way back to muzikari jakarta another exemplary moment is at the end of the first movement where legacy creates a musical space by having these two notes very far apart ligity said the end of the first movement of the cello concerto made me think of tightrope walking the registers the instrumentation and the dynamics create an emptiness that is like the void underneath the tightrope so to say legit once said that he learned a lot from mala's first symphony at the beginning there is a similar musical space that is created in which slowly elements emerge [Music] so [Music] the idea of musical space was very important for legacy the second movement is not still standing at all it has much more of a driving energy to it it is much more gestural and agitated and is structured in many little different sections there are some wild passages where all the strings play these incredibly chaotic gestures which are abruptly interrupted by this mechanical music for example it's a great moment [Music] uh my [Music] this more fragmentary form of composition is also something ligety would explore in later pieces like his second string quartet the cello concerto is a rather intimate concerto and often the soloist is not very distinguishable from the orchestra legacy would go on and write other great concerti in his life that we will talk about later so we saw how ligety refined this type of streaming sound composition and how he added new layers to it the harmonic and melodic dimensions re-emerging after being completely buried in the massive sound fields of atmosphere but as i said ligety always wanted to evolve he now had explored this sound world and he wanted a change he didn't want to have a typical legacy sound that he would just continue producing on and on the next pieces in his catalogue would become more and more different but before that i want to mention two organ etudes which he wrote right after lontano [Music] the first one called harmonies is really the most static piece of legacy no disturbances no disruptions no abrupt contrasts whatsoever just sound changing its harmonic and tumblr colors slowly it consists only of a succession of chords in which one note changes at a time but what makes this piece special is that legacy asks for the organ to have reduced air pressure so that the produced tone is very strange and actually also the intonation is modified so that we end up with these micro tonal colors [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] microtonality is also something negative would explore much more in later works i wanted to quickly mention this piece because i just love its sound sometimes it sounds like electronics sometimes really like human voices it's really fascinating but it's really different on each organ the second etude called kool-aid is quite the contrary and is very similar to the next piece we're going to look at [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Mattia Aisemberg-Pham

Views: 5,518

Keywords: Music, contemporary music, classical music, new music, modern music, analysis, music history, music theory, Ligeti, György Ligeti, Life, Life and Music, Art, Bartok, musical studies, musical analysis

Id: pa41z_z-dZI

Length: 89min 46sec (5386 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021