Wednesday, in addition to being the second full day of Autumn (time flies whether you're having fun or not), marks the opening of our new season with the Balourdet Quartet at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg at 7:30. They'll be playing Haydn's "Lark" Quartet, Ligeti's 2nd Quartet, and Smetana's 1st Quartet, "From My Life." The two earlier posts covered the Haydn and the Smetana; this post looks into the world behind György Ligeti's quartet from 1968.
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| Ligeti, speaking about his music at a rehearsal in 1984 |
Ligeti’s Centennial Year, 2023, passed largely unnoticed in American concert halls, though he has been recognized as one of the world’s leading, more innovative voices in what is often called (because everything has to be called something) “post-modernism” (what do you call whatever comes next?). Things had changed radically with the New Century – this would be 1900 – and artists, not just composers, were looking for something appropriately new. It didn’t happen overnight: Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring were first heard in 1913; Schoenberg, though abandoning tonality, didn’t develop his “twelve-tone style,” usually called Serialism, until the 1920s, around the time Stravinsky adopted a “neo-classical” style and Bartók began exploring the folk music of his native Hungary and incorporating it into his own natural style not as a form of imitation but by absorbing the elements at its core to create his own unique sound.
“When you are accepted in a club, without willing or without noticing you take over certain habits of what is in and what is out,” György Ligeti said in a 1993 talk. “Tonality was definitely out. To write melodies, even non-tonal melodies, was absolutely taboo. Periodic rhythms” (that is, the repeated patterns we associate with certain meters) “pulsation, was taboo, not possible. Music has to be a priori… It worked when it was new but it became stale. Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to [Classical-era] tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.”
Most composers’ lives – or at least their musical output – are usually divided into the ubiquitous three parts: Early, Middle, and Late. Ligeti disavowed the Bartók-inspired music he wrote while living in Communist Hungary, adopted the then current avant-garde style when he escaped to the West and settled in Austria and Germany, a style he then also disavowed by fusing – and this was the journey – elements of the past and the present to find his own voice. The 2nd String Quartet is one of these pieces. By combining elements from the 15th Century – think Ockgehem, especially, with his cerebral counterpoint – with elements of folk music (courtesy of Bartók and Kodály) and the various things he heard (and learned or rejected) from the German-led avant-garde of Stockhausen (and even though Boulez was a French composer, he was thoroughly Germanic in his creative style), Ligeti composed a series of works in the 1960s that catapulted him to the forefront of New Music. Later he would expand on this, between the influences of Franz Liszt’s pianistic virtuosity, the “saxophone solos of Eric Dolphy,” and the complex rhythmic polyphony of African Pygmy tribes, to evolve a new voice in the decades ahead.
György Ligeti – his last name sort of rhymes with “lickety” rather than “spaghetti,” and if you can approximate his first name in French (Zhorzh) it’s better than pronouncing it GHYER-ghee – was born in 1923 in what is now Romania but which had, until a few years before his birth, been part of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family was ethnically Hungarian (as well as Jewish) but given the fluidity of history and the political boundaries in Eastern Europe over the centuries, it’s not entirely logical to identify him as a Romanian composer. As a child, he was 6 years old before he’d heard a language other than Hungarian being spoken around him. In 1940, as World War II reshaped Europe once more, that part of Romania was “returned” to Hungary, now under Nazi control. His initial musical studies were interrupted when the regime conscripted him for a “forced labor brigade.” His brother was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp and his parents were sent to Auschwitz. Only György and his mother survived the war.
Afterwards, Ligeti resumed his studies, this time in Budapest where he studied with, among others, Zoltan Kodály. (Bartók, fleeing the Nazis in 1940, had died in the United States in 1945.) With the Nazis driven out of Hungary, the Communists went about taking over the elected government by threatening to have their coalition members deported unless they “converted” to their cause), finally setting up their own dictatorship by 1949. They cut off most communication with the West and it was almost impossible for a Hungarian composer to follow what was going on in new music circles outside the Eastern Bloc: the ruling Communists “outlawed” modernist tendencies, except for an accessible folk-based style like Kodály or Bartók. Somehow he managed to avoid the dilemma many composers living in totalitarian states of having to write propaganda music.
However, Ligeti learned about the basics of serialism (anathema to the Nazis and the Soviets) not from musical sources but from reading Thomas Mann’s recently published novel, Doctor Faustus, where the main character, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, was thinly based on Arnold Schoenberg. He had minimal access to a radio where he could occasionally hear broadcasts of the latest music coming out of Germany and became fascinated with the avant-garde works of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, works he cherished as statements of creative freedom and works he listened to as the bullets flew around him.
In more ways than one, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 marked a turning point in Ligeti’s life. As Soviet tanks crushed the uprising, Ligeti hurriedly fled to Vienna, leaving behind most of what he’d written so far. This represented the past: now, he said, he “believed in twelve-tone music.” Soon, he gravitated toward the Darmstadt school of Stockhausen and Boulez and worked with the electronic studios in Köln where he soon fell out with the political in-fighting (“I, personally, [had] no ambition to be first or to be important”). But he ended up approximating the sound of electronic music while using live instruments and voices, going one step beyond the didactic “total twelve-tone” style of Stockhausen, Boulez and others. While there were elements of the “theoretical control” championed by serialists that Ligeti retained, he abandoned many others details which, frankly, made the music too cerebral, creating what one critic dismissed as “The Honk-Squeak School of Music.”
He called this new style of his micropolyphony, a texture created by various threads of sound played by individual instruments or voices that while played linearly created the vertical structures of dense tone-clusters rather than traditional chords, often working within very narrow confines (for instance, four different instruments weaving back and forth between all the chromatic notes playable between G and B-flat: it would present a constant sound of all the notes but undulating as the individual lines fluctuated in free and conflicting rhythms to give the impression of shimmering colors. Being made up of moving lines they still managed to give the impression of a static sound.
Of this, Ligeti writes, “Both Atmosphères and Lontano [see below] have a dense canonic structure. But you cannot actually hear the polyphony, the canon. You hear a kind of impenetrable texture, something like a very densely woven cobweb. I have retained melodic lines in the process of composition, they are governed by rules as strict as Palestrina’s or those of the Flemish school [some of the most rigorous systems in musical theory before the development of serialism], but the rules of this polyphony are worked out by me. The polyphonic structure does not come through, you cannot hear it; it remains hidden in a microscopic, underwater world, to us inaudible. I call it micropolyphony (such a beautiful word!).”
It is, essentially, a way of creating a systematic – I like to call it “consistent” – approach to the musical material without taking the time to find each pitch arbitrarily (and to what benefit?). One can argue this is little different from the canons of Bach’s Goldberg Variations or the mensuration canons that proliferate, for example, in the Missa prolationem by Johannes Ockeghem in the 15th Century.
Ligeti's music, particularly these works of the 1960s, is best known to a public not acquainted with 20th century classical music through its use in three of Stanley Kubrick’s films. The soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) included excerpts from four of his pieces: Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna, Requiem and Aventures, but the music was used, and in some cases modified, without Ligeti's knowledge (reportedly, the composer discovered this while sitting in the theater, watching the film!) or, for that matter, permission. So, given this copyright infringement (“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”), Ligeti “successfully sued for having had his music distorted.” He and Kubrick then settled out of court. Apparently they got along better in the future: Kubrick sought permission and compensated Ligeti for use of his Lontano in The Shining (1980); and a brief excerpt from Ligeti's Musica ricercata was used at pivotal moments in Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). “At the German premiere of that film, by which time Kubrick had died, his widow was escorted by Ligeti himself.”
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| Ligeti in 1965 |
“The five movements,” Stephen Plaistow writes in his liner notes for the DG recording, “differ widely from each other in their types of motion. In the first, the structure is largely broken up” [in contrasting fragments that seem kaleidoscopic, with scurrying whisper-like passages within a narrow range alternating with sustained harmonics or wild scrambling chaos like they’re making it up; every note however is written out and, in fact, technically controlled.] “In the second, everything is reduced to very slow motion, and the music seems to be coming from a distance, with great lyricism. The pizzicato third movement is another of Ligeti's machine-like studies, hard and mechanical, whereby the parts playing repeated notes creates a ‘granulated’ continuum. In the fourth, which is fast and threatening, everything that happened before is crammed together. Lastly, in strong contrast, the fifth movement spreads itself out. In each movement, the same basic configurations return, but each time their coloring or viewpoint is different, so that the overall form only really emerges when one listens to all five movements in context.”
Allegro nervoso
Sostenuto, molto calmo
Come un meccanismo di precisione
Presto furioso, brutale, tumultuoso
Allegro con delicatezza
Note adjectives like “nervous,” “very calm,” “furious, brutal, tumultuous” and finally “with delicacy.” The third movement translates as “Like a machine, with precision.”
performed by the Arditti Quartet (from their recording released on the SONY label as part of the Gyorgy Ligeti Edition Vol. 1)
Having discovered a sonority he could call his own, in a manner of speaking, Ligeti began to explore how to use this “micropolyphony” in different ways:
Atmosphères (1961) for large orchestra
Requiem (1963-1965) for two choirs and large orchestra
Lux Aeterna (1966) for 16-part a cappella chorus
Lontano (1967) for large orchestra
and there is also a short work for harpsichord, Continuum, exploring similar textures, which he composed in 1968, the same year he wrote the 2nd String Quartet. Each medium – orchestra, chorus, chamber music, keyboard – requires a different approach, an application suitable to the limitations of the forces involved, obviously much easier to bring off with a full orchestra but bringing with it new challenges when using only four stringed instruments or a harpsichord.
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If you’re having any difficulties making sense out of that or out of Ligeti’s music – and there’s no reason to feel embarrassed if you cannot – frankly, composers writing about how their music is “put together” in a technical sense can be some of the most boring commentary imaginable, completely incomprehensible to a listener not familiar with “new music” (whether it’s the latest in modern music or merely music, however old, is just unfamiliar to the listener) and of little interest to someone who just wants to know “what the hell is going on?” I’ve read composers’ program notes that, as a composer myself, might be interesting since usually I want to figure out “how does he (or she) do that?” Most listeners are more likely to want to know “why does this sound different from the stuff I do know?” As I’ve often said, you don’t need to know a lot of facts about a composer or the composition in order to “enjoy” it; sometimes it’s more of a sense of “context” that will make that appreciation a little deeper, getting beyond the mere surface, whether you find that surface difficult to “understand” on first hearing (especially if you don’t like it on first hearing). You don’t need to read a manual designed for engineers who are going to build a car’s engine from scratch if all you want to do is drive the car to the grocery store…
One of my favorite stories about an introduction to something new and, initially, off-putting involves a class of college juniors at the University of Connecticut. The semester was designed around the transition between the more familiar 19th Century and the wilds of the mostly unfamiliar 20th Century with its myriad of styles and aesthetics (keeping in mind this was in the late-1970s, and there’s been a lot of “new music” under the bridge since then). “Today we’re going to begin examining the music of Bela Bartók,” I said, and immediately a clarinetist in the second row harrumphed dismissively. “Ah, I take it you don’t like Bartók…?”
“No, it’s all motor-music and dissonance and….” – he then listed a number of points that another colleague of mine would have used in a lecture called “Why You Don’t Like Bartók.”
Rather than rebut his statements, and knowing he was a big fan of Mahler, I asked to him explain what it was he liked – no, loved! – about Mahler. “Oh, those incredibly long melodies and the way they unfold; the harmonies that pull you along and suddenly change direction; the sudden contrasts that catch you unaware…” and so on for a few more rhapsodic minutes.
“Did you like Mahler the first time you heard it?”
“No, actually, I hated it!”
When he didn’t elaborate, I asked him, “what was it you didn’t like about it, on first hearing?”
“Well, it was awfully long, I mean those symphonies seem like they go on for hours. And the harmony never seemed to go where you expected it – then suddenly something happened and you’re like ‘now what’s going on?’…”
I didn’t point out that those were other ways of describing what it was he did like about it. Instead, I simply asked him, “so how did you come to love Mahler’s music?”
“Well, I had to listen to it a lot… and…”
(Insert long pause, here.)
“Oh…”
Given that epiphany, I’m pleased to say that after he graduated, he went on to Julliard to pursue a master’s degree in clarinet performance. I happened to attend his Master’s Recital and one of the works on that program was the trio for clarinet, violin, and piano, “Contrasts,” by Bela Bartók.
One of the things I’ve discovered that, repeated listening (while paying attention to what you’re hearing) is more difficult when you don’t have a way to describe it (and describing “sound” in “words” is not always a reliable experience). The average listener doesn’t have the vocabulary to do that with a piece of music, just as I don’t have the vocabulary and expertise to understand what friends are talking about when going off on anything involving computer technology or, for that matter, pop culture. Somewhere, I’d picked up a way of examining music by breaking it down into “parameters” (not a word I enjoy using, but when generically used to describe different aspects of music, it’ll have to do): these topics allow you to focus on one aspect of the music at a time, rather than floundering around trying to think of something to say more interesting than “interesting.” And it works well whether you only know a little about music theory or a lot. The more you know, the more detailed you can get; if you don’t know that much technically, at least it could give you something to latch on to.
Whoever this theorist was, the system he’d devised he’d called SHMRG.
S = Sonority: what instruments are involved, what sounds do you hear, what different ways does the composer use those instruments to create those sounds?
H = Harmony, usually an element most listeners don’t really know how to talk about, especially when you consider how many years of “theory” – “how harmony works” – undergraduate students take and will continue to take through further years of graduate study. But begin with “is it chordal?” How do those chords move (in expected, unexpected ways)? If it’s not chordal, how does the composer create those sounds? What about the texture? Melody + Accompaniment or does the music consist of various independent lines (“polyphony”)? One of my favorites is, does it sound logical or arbitrary (if it’s tonal, does it lead you in the direction of a home key; if it’s not, is there some way the chords pull you forward – is there some way the composer consistently uses “tension and release”?
M = Melody, usually the first thing most listeners hear: it’s what strikes you as “memorable” and the easiest way to determine whether you like it or not. But how is the “melodic element” used? Long-arching tunes like Mahler or short, motive-based themes like Beethoven or Haydn? What if the music’s not really “melodic”?
R = Rhythm, and by that I mean is the music divided into beats (or pulses) that create recognizable patterns (do you feel the urge to march, or dance)? If it’s not, does it sound chaotic or static? In the larger sense, do the different sections of the music create their own sense of time (a long lyrical section contrasted with shorter, more dramatic sections)? I’d rather think about the relation of Time in the music and how it’s subdivided (like minutes and seconds) and how does that create a sense of tempo, a sense of mood; but then SHMTG is harder to say…
G = Growth, though most people would prefer to think about Form (okay, SHMRF…?) but “form” gets us immediately into the larger span-of-things (Sonata Form, Rondo Form) when I’d rather you think on the micro-level: is the music based on “motives” rather than “tunes”? How do the smaller units we perceive “evolve” (“grow”) into larger ones? Two very important aspects of any kind of Western Music are “unity” and “variety” – so how do these contrasts shape the music we’re responding to? Are these units consistent (phrases like a march or a waltz) or unequal (phrases of different and varying lengths)? Do the larger units subdivide into regular smaller units, or do they flow continuously to create a constantly unfolding span of time?
A lot of “modern music” – that is, “modern” in the sense of what was new in the 20th Century – is not only “non-melodic,” it’s often “non-harmonic.” So what does the composer use to replace these elements? Rather than “recognizable tunes,” is it built on “recognizable shapes” (I prefer calling them “gestures”). If you listen to the opening of the Ligeti quartet on the Balourdet’s program, you’ll recognize elements of silence and near-silence, quiet and rapidly meandering sounds built around clusters of notes (hardly a “chord” but does it work like one?), and then suddenly some kind of outburst (contrast). How do these elements – in the sense of being unifying elements or contrasting elements – relate to each other; how do they create a sense of the whole? Is it like light being refracted through a prism or maybe the sudden intrusion of unwanted thoughts (“boo!”)? If you respond emotionally to a lovely melody in a Schubert song or an increase in harmonic tension in a late Beethoven quartet, how do these elements make you respond? Is it enough to create the sense of “a piece” (making up a whole) or does it sound (as many critics have said) like “a collection of special effects waiting for a piece to happen”?
Ah! Speaking of epiphanies, I just had a vision of a dusty brown-covered book on my shelf of theory texts most of which I have ignored for the past 40 years and realized this is the one that used SHMRG as Guidelines for Style Analysis. It’s by the theorist, Jan LaRue (1918-2004) and originally published in 1970 by W.W. Norton.Though geared for advanced theory students, much of the material, especially the delineations of what to listen for re:SHMRG, can be applicable to most listeners.
– Dick Strawser
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