The Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti… you’ve probably heard his music even if you don’t know the daunting-sounding name. For Stanley Kubrick was wont to use it in his films, principally ‘2001’. And his influence remains strong enough for the Barbican to stage a day-long series of concerts, of which I was only able to catch the evening.
Though he was composing earlier, the Sixties saw him hit on his mature style. He’s quoted in the programme as saying “I have always been looking for an alternative to the 12-note temperament”. And he became interested in what we’d now call World music, not to imitate or incorporate it but to find life outside the conventions of Western harmony. Imagine if visual art had not been confined just to subject matter but to colour, with three agreed shades or green and purple unheard of.
Instead, in the pioneering ’Atmospheres’ (1961), he used ‘sound masses’ where instruments cluster together rather than contribute individual lines, producing ‘adjacent’ sounds to one another which need to be heard in combination. Imagine the difference between ballet, where figures dance in synchronisation but stay separate, to circus acrobats climbing and jumping all over each other. And the piece is exhilarating to listen to to this day, particularly to witness regular classical instruments emitting such unearthly sounds.
His mention of “12-note” refers to then fashionable Serialism. And it’s notable that, quite unlike Serialism, the piece has great dynamics. It just achieves them without the normal standards of musical progression. It’s been described by Harold Kaufman as "a magma of evolving sound”.
The next piece, at least chronologically, was ’Clocks and Clouds’ (1972/3). In a nice anecdote, the programme explains the title comes from a Karl Popper lecture he attended. The then-standard notion of physics was that the sub-atomic world, with its quirky quarks and other weirdly behaving particles, was one thing and the clockwork order of the stars and the planets another. Whereas Popper insisted on a continuity between order and chaos, between clocks and clouds.
I’ve often compared contemporary music of this era to experiencing a weather front. And by extension of Popper’s metaphor, much of the appeal comes from perceiving an order to the music which you can’t quite discern. It’s like receiving an alien radio signal which is compelling for hovering on the periphery of decipherability. The voices in ’Clocks and Clouds’ particularly suggest this. And, possibly by co-incidence, as Ligeti grew up in the Eastern block, he first heard contemporary music by illegally tuning into German radio stations.
The programme also included ’San Francisco Polyphony’ (1973/4) and two much later pieces, after Ligeti had returned from a break from composing. In the intervening time his sonic cosmonaut adventures had fallen more into earth’s orbit. As suggested by the tiles of both ’Piano Concerto’ (1985/8) and ’Violin Concerto’ (1989/93) their return to convention even extends to having a lead instrument. There’s quotes from the man to suggest that, once the unexpected is expected from you, the thing to do becomes the expected.
It’s true that ’Atmospheres’ packs more in it’s nine dense minutes than ’Violin Concerto’ does in twenty-eight. And the concertos might have worked better programmed alongside one another, despite their greater length. But their most interesting feature was their lack of interest in, to use a current political term, ‘centrism’. Instead of making their prridge meh they span the dial all the way from the most regular clocks to the most ungraspable clouds. The programme describes ’Violin Concerto’ as “a labyrinth in which some paths were familiar, some weirdly unfamiliar, and one could never guess when the music might flip from one to another.”
And ’Violin Concerto’ in particular is interesting for a return to folk influences of his younger years. At times the lead violin seems to be echoed in a distorting mirror of the ensemble, where they’d mangle his melodies and hand them back to him. Yet at others they’d provide melodies of their own.
Though Liegti knew Stockhausen, one of the other great contemporary composers of the era, he only very briefly dallied with electronic sounds. In fact, though the music’s quite different, there’s more of a parallel in approach to the American Minimalists. Both saw World music as an escape from an impasse Western composition had mired itself in, and so stuck to ‘standard’ instruments. Both eschewed a hierarchy of instruments and musical progression. Both later decided that their own rules now risked becoming restrictions, and tried to reconcile themselves with the Western tradition.
Depending on your whereabouts and whenabouts, you may be able to hear this concert on the BBC iPlayer.
And you’ll know this…
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