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GYöRGY LIGETI/ 2011
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on paper: Portraits 3 | | Medium: | Giclée on Japanese matte paper | | Size (inches): | 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size) | | Size (mm): | 420 x 297 (paper size) | | Edition size: | 25 | | Catalog #: | PP_0211 | | Description: | From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
"Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland."
- György Ligeti
György Ligeti - The native form of this personal name is Ligeti György Sándor. This article uses the Western name order.
György Sándor Ligeti (Hungarian: Ligeti György Sándor, [ˈligɛti ˈɟřrɟ ˈʃaːndor]; May 28, 1923 – June 12, 2006) was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born in a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he briefly lived in Hungary before becoming an Austrian citizen.
Music:
From 1956 to Le Grand Macabre
Upon arriving in Cologne, he began to write electronic music alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig at the electronic studio of West German Radio (WDR). He completed only two works in this medium, however—the pieces Glissandi (1957) and Artikulation (1958)—before returning to instrumental music. A third work, originally entitled Atmosphčres but later known as Pičce électronique Nr. 3, was planned, but the technical limitations of the time prevented Ligeti from realizing it completely. It was finally realized in 1996 by the Dutch composers Kees Tazelaar and Johan van Kreij of the Institute of Sonology.[16]
Aventures, like its companion piece Nouvelles Aventures, is a composition for three singers and instrumental septet, to a text semantically without meaning of Ligeti's own devising. Each of the singers has five roles to play, exploring five areas of emotion, and they switch from one to the other so quickly and abruptly that all five areas are present throughout the piece.[17]
Ligeti's music appears to have been subsequently influenced by his electronic experiments, and many of the sounds he created resembled electronic textures. The texture used in the second movement of Apparitions and Atmosphčres Ligeti would later dub "micropolyphony".
The Requiem is a work for soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, twenty-part chorus (four each of soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, tenor, and bass), and orchestra. Though, at about half an hour, it is the longest piece he had composed up to that point.[18]
Lux Aeterna is a 16-voice a cappella piece whose text is also associated with the Latin Requiem.
String Quartet no. 2 belongs to the great tradition of quartet writing, from the Classical masters to Berg and Bartók. The five movements differ widely from each other in their types of motion. In the first, the structure is largely broken up, as in Aventures. 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.[19]
Ramifications, completed a year before the Chamber Concerto, is scored for an ensemble of strings in twelve parts—seven violins, two violas, two cellos and a double bass—each of which may be taken by one player or several. The twelve are divided into two numerically equal groups but with the instruments in the first group tuned approximately a quarter-tone higher (four violins, a viola and a cello). As the group play, the one tuned higher inevitably tends to slide down toward the other, and both get nearer each other in pitch.[20]
In the Chamber Concerto, several layers, processes and kinds of movement can take place on different planes simultaneously. In spite of frequent markings of "senza tempo", the instrumentalists are not given linear freedom; Ligeti insists on keeping his texture under strict control at any given moment. The form is like a "precision mechanism". Ligeti has always been fascinated by machines that do not work properly and by the world of technology and automation. The ticking of periodic mechanical noises of not-quite-reliable machinery occurs in many of his works. The scoring is for flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling oboe d'amore and cor anglais/english horn), clarinet, bass clarinet (doubling second clarinet), horn, trombone, harpsicord (doubling Hammond organ), piano (doubling celesta), and solo string quartet.[21]
From the 1970s, Ligeti turned away from total chromaticism and began to concentrate on rhythm. Pieces such as Continuum (1968) and Clocks and Clouds (1972–73) were written before he heard the music of Steve Reich and Terry Riley in 1972. But the second of his Three Pieces for Two Pianos, entitled "Self-portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin in the background)," commemorates this affirmation and influence. During the 1970s, he also became interested in the polyphonic pipe music of the Banda-Linda tribe from the Central African Republic, which he heard through the recordings of one of his students.[22]
In 1977, Ligeti completed his only opera, Le Grand Macabre, thirteen years after its initial commission. Loosely based on Michel de Ghelderode's 1934 play, La Balade du grand macabre, it is a work of Absurd theatre—Ligeti called it an "anti-anti-opera"—in which Death (Nekrotzar) arrives in the fictional city of Breughelland and announces that the end of the world will occur at midnight. Musically, Le Grand Macabre draws on techniques not associated with Ligeti's previous work, including quotations and pseudo-quotations of other works[23] and the use of consonant thirds and sixths. After Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti would abandon the use of pastiche,[24] but would increasingly incorporate consonant harmonies (even major and minor triads) into his work, albeit not in a diatonic context.
After Le Grand Macabre
From left to right: György Ligeti, Lukas Ligeti, Mrs. György Ligeti, Conlon Nancarrow, and Michael Daugherty at the ISCM World Music Days in Graz, Austria, 1982
After Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti struggled for some time to find a new style. Besides two short pieces for harpsichord, he did not complete another major work until the Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano in 1982, over four years after the opera. His music of the 1980s and 1990s continued to emphasize complex mechanical rhythms, often in a less densely chromatic idiom, tending to favor displaced major and minor triads and polymodal structures. During this time, Ligeti also began to explore alternate tuning systems through the use of natural harmonics for horns (as in the Horn Trio and Piano Concerto) and scordatura for strings (as in the Violin Concerto). Additionally, most of his works in this period are multi-movement works, rather than the extended single movements of Atmosphčres and San Francisco Polyphony.
From 1985 to 2001, Ligeti completed three books of Études for piano (Book I, 1985; Book II, 1988–94; Book III, 1995–2001). Comprised of eighteen compositions in all, the Études draw from a diverse range of sources, including gamelan,[25][26][27] African polyrhythms, Béla Bartók, Conlon Nancarrow, Thelonious Monk,[28][29] and Bill Evans. Book I was notably written as preparation for the Piano Concerto, which contains a number of similar motivic and melodic elements.
In 1988, Ligeti completed his Piano Concerto, a work which he described as a statement of his "aesthetic credo".[30] Initial sketches of the Concerto began in 1980, but it was not until 1986 that he found a way forward and the work proceeded more quickly.[31] The Concerto explores many of the ideas worked out in the Études but in an orchestral context.
In 1993, Ligeti completed his Violin Concerto after four years of work. Like the Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto uses the wide range of techniques he had developed up until that point as well as the new ideas he was working out at the moment. Among other techniques, it uses "microtonality, rapidly changing textures, comic juxtapositions... Hungarian folk melodies, Bulgarian dance rhythms, references to medieval and Renaissance music and solo violin writing that ranges from the slow-paced and sweet-toned to the angular and fiery."[32]
Other notable works from this period are the Viola Sonata (1994) and the Nonsense Madrigals (1993), a set of six a cappella compositions that set English texts from William Brighty Rands, Lewis Carroll, and Heinrich Hoffman. The third Madrigal is based on the alphabet.
Ligeti's last works were the Hamburg Concerto for horn and chamber orchestra (1998–99, revised 2003, dedicated to Marie Luise Neunecker), the song cycle Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel ("With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles", 2000), and the eighteenth piano étude "Canon" (2001). After Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti planned to write a second opera, first to be based on Shakespeare's The Tempest and later on Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but neither piece ever came to fruition.
References"
16. ^ Jennifer Joy Iverson, "Historical Memory and György Ligeti's Sound-Mass Music 1958–1968", Ph.D. thesis (Austin: University of Texas, Butler School of Music, 2009): 92.
17. ^ Stephen Plaistow, in the liner notes to the Deutsche Grammophon recording 423 244-2 of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, Ramifications, String Quartet No. 2, Aventures, and Lux aeterna, p. 4.
18. ^ Steinitz 2003, p. 144
19. ^ Stephen Plaistow, in the liner notes to the Deutsche Grammophon recording 423 244-2 of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, Ramifications, String Quartet No. 2, Aventures, and Lux aeterna, p. 3.
20. ^ Stephen Plaistow, in the liner notes to the Deutsche Grammophon recording 423 244-2 of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, Ramifications, String Quartet No. 2, Aventures, and Lux aeterna, p. 3.
21. ^ Stephen Plaistow, in the liner notes to the Deutsche Grammophon recording 423 244-2 of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, Ramifications, String Quartet No. 2, Aventures, and Lux aeterna, p. 2.
22. ^ Steinitz 2003, pp. 271-72
23. ^ Steinitz 2003, p. 230
24. ^ Steinitz 2003, p. 244
25. ^ Wilson, Peter Niklas. "Interkulturelle Fantasien: György Ligetis Klavieretüden Nr 7 und 8", Melos: Jahrbuch für zeitgenössische Musik 51 (1992, "Klaviermusik des 20. Jahrhunderts"): 63–84
26. ^ Chen, Yung-jen. "Analysis and Performance Aspects of György Ligeti's Études pour piano: 'Fanfares' and 'Arch-en ciel'", DMA diss, (Columbus: The Ohio State University 2007), 37
27. ^ Arnowitt, Michael. "Ligeti and His Influences: Music to Wow both the Mind and the Body" (Michael Arnowitt homepage, [2009]) (accessed 4 February 2010).
28. ^ http://homepages.sover.net/~foodsong/ligeti.htm
29. ^ Steinitz 2003, p. 292
30. ^ "On My Piano Concerto," trans. Robert Cogan, Sonus: A Journal of Investigations into Global Musical Possibilities 9 no. 1 (Fall 1988), 13.
31. ^ Steinitz 2003, pp. 315-316
32. ^ Allan, Kozinn (14 November 2005). "The Prankster as Omnivore". New York Times.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/György_Ligeti
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