György Ligeti, who spent most of his career in Austria and Germany, with a period in Sweden, achieved international recognition when his piece Apparitions was performed at the I960 International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival in Cologne. His music reached an even wider audience when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick used three of his pieces (Requiem, Lux Aeterna, and Atmosphères) in the soundtrack to his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Ligeti explored many different and wide-ranging techniques, while always keeping a recognisable sound. One such technique he called “micro-polyphony.” This was actually invented in the 1960s by many composers, such as XENAKIS and PENDERECKI, but it was Ligeti who articulated it and exploited its possibilities. It enabled the composer to give internal movement to blocks of material separate from the overlying contour of the piece.
Ligeti was born in Transylvania, which was then part of Hungary, now in Romania, on May 28, 1923. As a child he studied music and composition, and graduated from Budapest Academy of Music in 1949. The following year, Ligeti joined the faculty of the Academy as a professor of counterpoint and harmony. While there he made an extensive study of Romanian folk music (influenced by Béla BARTÓK), and many of his early compositions were based on arrangements of Hungarian and Romanian folk tunes.
Living behind the Iron Curtain after World War II meant that Ligeti was cut off from most of the experimental music that was being developed in the West. Also, the Communist regime refused publication and prohibited the performance of many of his more radical pieces. In 1956, after the democratic uprising failed in Hungary, Ligeti fled the country and sought refuge in Vienna.
Once in the West, Ligeti was invited by Herbert Eimert, director of West German Radio’s electronic music studios, to use their facilities. Eimert’s studios was one of the early centres of exploration an creativity in electronic music. Several important early pieces of electronic music were created at the studios, including Karlheinz STOCKHAUSEN’S Gesang derjunglinge (1956) and Ligeti’s Artikulation, which was first heard there in March 1958.
Other pieces of this period based on micro-polyphony included Ligeti’s orchestral works Apparitions (1958–59) and Atmosphères (1961), and the organ piece Volumina (1961–62). The thick texture of these pieces is the result of many layers of individual sound lines stacked one on top of the other, thus filling in each chromatic tone of the scale.
Not satisfied with the density of sound generated by the chromatic scale, Ligeti began in 1968 to explore the potential of using microtones. In his piece, Ramifications, for string orchestra, Ligeti required half the players to tune their instruments a quartertone higher than the rest. In this way, the harmonic density is expanded from 12 to 24 notes per octave, although the two groups end the piece at the same pitch.
In the 1970s, Ligeti began to turn to other experiments in style. His only opera, Le grand macabre (1974–77), serves as the stylistic culmination of his experimentation in linear writing. But the opera also incorporates earlier musical styles, and Ligeti even used some of his own student exercises in counterpoint for quasi-Baroque music.
In the 1990s Ligeti turned back even farther to earlier musical styles, and admitted that his Trio for Horn, Violin, and Piano (1982) and his Violin Concerto were “post-modernist pieces.”
Timothy Kloth
SEE ALSO:
ELECTRONIC MUSIC.
FURTHER READING
Antokoletz, Elliott. Twentieth-Century Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992);
Richart, Robert W. György Ligeti: A Bio-bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Aventures; Chamber Concerto;
Horn Trio; Nouvelles Aventures;
Piano Studies; Ramifications.