Ligeti Nonsense Madrigals and Atmospheres

Research Project Discussion of a Composer and Two Compositions

G y ö rgy Ligeti  At  A t m o s p h è r e s  No  N o n s e n s e M a d r i g a l s ( T h e A l p h a b e t )

Pablo Martinez Martinez Seminar in Twentieth-Century Music

MUSI 5338.01 Index

P roposal

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H is tor ical Context of Li geti and his W orks

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 At  A t m o s p h è r e s

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 No  N o n s e n s e M a d r i g a l s

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Musical Style of  At  A t m o s p h è res and  No  N o n s e n s e M a d r i g a l s

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Musi ca l D iscussi on

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Anal ysis of Melodi c and Har monic As pects

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Rhythm

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Accompani ment and Music al Mat er i al

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Form

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Text ur e

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Sound: O r chestr ati on, Timbr e, Dynami cs

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Text ( The Alphabet  o  o n l y )

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Conclusion

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Bi ogr aphy

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Gy ö rgy Ligeti lived in a historical moment of the dualism in Western Music: Tonality and Atonality. His constant pushing and stretching of the boundaries of tonality led him to reach new horizons. However, Ligeti’s intention was never to create innovative pieces merely to attract attention from the public. As he said in one of his interviews, “what I have done has nothing to do with sensationali sm.” 1  Through this project, I expect to find what aspects in Ligeti’s musical style are considered innovative in his works  Atmosph è res and  Nonsense Madrigals.

The orchestral work  Atmosph è res was written in 1961, and Ligeti dedicated it to M á ty á s Seiber (1905-60), a friend and Hungarian composer who lived in the West and who had di ed in a car accident in 1960. Ligeti had wanted to write a requiem since 1956. As Harald Kaufmann points out in 1969, with  Atmosph è res, Ligeti “wants us to hear this work as a requiem which is emerging from some subterranean cave, very far away, beyond the range of conscious percep tion.” 2  To generate music with lack of tonality, but also with such a slow motion which gives the impression that time has stopped, Ligeti works using clusters in canon. Through this project, I will show how clusters in  Atmosph è res and  Nonsense Madrigals  are one of the main tools employed by Ligeti in

order to create a mass that combines all the instrumental lines into one holistic sound. This conception of style in Ligeti’s music is called Textural Music. The music is not treated merely as melody or contrapuntal polyphonic structures (which were some of the main concerns of his contemporaries), but as a fluctuating, all-encompassing spider web containing melodies, chords, rhythmic motives, timbre

1 Bálint András Varga, From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 30. 2 Louise Duchesneau and Wolfgang Marx, György Ligeti: Of Foreign Lands and Strange Sounds (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011), 72.

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changes, etc. in a block of sound. The result obt ained is a texture like currents, turbulences, chaos, labyrinths and spirals. This mass of sound is moved trough the pieces with canon writing. In  Atmosph è res and  Nonsense Madrigals is possible to identify how one simple instrument or

group of instruments start a single melody, but this melody is played in canon by more instruments. The combination of the lines creates secundal chords, and those secundal chords are the origi n of clusters. As the entries of the new li nes are emerging, the mass of sound moves through the piece. Both clusters and use in canon as will be discussed in the musical analysis of  Atmosph è res and  Nonsense Madrigals. I will explain where these works are located stylistically.  Nonsense  Madrigals combines the Renaissance polyphony, textural music, and

nonsense text.  Atmosph è res  was originally a project of electronic music. Finally, it became a work that exploited the possibilities of the traditional orchestra. This research will try to explain how influenced was Ligeti by electronic music.

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Historical context of Ligeti and his works

Ligeti’s left of Hungary marked a turning point in his life and led him to know better the electronic music that was being created in Western Europe, especially in Germany. In Hungary, Ligeti had been in contact with Karlheinz Stockhausen, though sparsely. Towards the middle of the 1950s, the blockade of mail to and from Western Europe was gradually lifted allowing Ligeti to receive scores and records from abroad.

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It was

also during this time that Ligeti contacted Stockhausen who was, at the time, the leading modernist composer in post-war Germany. Despite  jammed radio broadcasts from the west, Ligeti was able to occasionally pick up German broadcasts. Through this, he was gradually introduced to the post-war European avant-garde. On November 7, Ligeti received a letter from Stockhausen saying that two of his electronic tape pieces, Kontra-Punkte  and Gesang der J ü nglinge , would be broadcast late at

night. While others sought safety in the cellar to avoid stray bullets from the battle outside, Ligeti obstinately remained upstairs to receive the radio broadcast:

...the first time I heard a Stockhausen piece was during the revolution, because [radio] jamming was stopped...The Soviets had come in and everybody was down in the cellars, but I went up so that I could hear the music clearly. There were detonations going on, and shrapnel, so it was quite dangerous to be listening. 4

Ligeti decided that he must l eave Budapest. Stockhausen had arranged for a scholarship to be granted to Ligeti to study at the electronic music 3 Paul Griffiths, Gyorgy Ligeti, (London: Robson Books, 1983), 14. 4 Ibid., 22.

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studio in Cologne. Ligeti described his dramatic escape from Hungary to the west:

The railway people organized trai ns for people who wanted to go in the direction of the Austrian frontier...The train stopped at every station, and they telephoned ahead to the next station to find out if there were Russian soldiers there...I and my wife took the train one day, and we got to a town in west Hungary about sixty kilometers from the bor der. There had been some mistake and the warning had failed: the train was surrounded by the Russian military. But they didn’t have enough people to cover the whole train. Within seconds they took away everybody from the front half  of the train, but we in our end very quickly got out and into town. Somebody told us to go to the post off ice, where we could be hidden overnight...And the next day the postman took us on by train, just an engine and a mail wagon, with ten or twelve people hidden under the mailbags. It was quit e dangerous, because there was a three-year old child wit h us, and he had to be given tablets to make him sleep. Then we were dropped quite close to the frontier, not in a station but outside, and we were told to get out and do what we could. It was perhaps ten kilometers from the border, and already within the prohibited zone, with Russians patrolling. Then the next night somebody showed us the frontier, while all the time the Russians were lighting the sky wit h rockets. We knew we had reached the border when we fell into th e mud where the mines had been.

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After making it to the west, Ligeti stayed for a brief time in Vienna. In February 1957, he made his way to Cologne where he stayed with Stockhausen. Once there, Ligeti immersed himself in the modern music

5 Griffiths, 24.

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scene. He went to the Electronic M usic Studio of Cologne where he began experimenting with electronic music.

 Atmosph è res

In Cologne, Ligeti began to write electronic music alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig at the electronic studio of West German Radio (WDR). However, he completed only two works in WDR—the pieces Glissandi  (1957) and  Artikulation   (1958)—before returning to instrumental music. A third work, originally entitled  Atmosph è res  but later known as Pi è ce  É l ectronique  Nr. 3 , was planned,

but the technical limitations of the time prevented Ligeti from realizing it completely. As Ligeti stated, Stockhausen influence “was quite decisive for me: I would never have been able to compose works like  Aparitions  and  Atmosph è res  without what I received from him.” 6

His first orchestral work  Apparitions  written between 1958 and 1959 was premiered at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in 1960. The performance of this work put Ligeti on the international stage as an important new figure in avant-garde music. In particular, listeners were drawn to the work’s new and original sound world which was quite different from the integral serial works prevalent at the time.

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6 Marina Lobanova, György Ligeti: Style, Ideas, Poetics, Translated by Mark Suttleworth (Berlin: Verlag Ernst Kuhn, 2002), 382. 7 György Ligeti, György Ligeti in Conversation with Pé ter Varnai, Josef H äusler, Claude Samuel and  Himself . Translated into English by Gabor J. Schabert, Sarah E. Soulsby, Terence Kilmartin, and Geoffrey Skelton (London: Eulenberg Books, 1983), 8.

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Ligeti’s next major work for large orchestra was  Atmosph è res  in 1961. He described the piece as “floating, fluctuating sound.”

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 Atmosph è res

was commissioned by the Southwest German Radio and had its world premiere on 22 October by Hans Rosbaud conducting the SWF Symphony Orchestra at the Donaueschingen Festival. The work was a huge success. At its premiere, the audience demanded an encore of the entire work. The SWF recorded this performance for broadcast, and this recording has been released commercially on CD several times. Ligeti became famous in Western Europe after this piece.

Ligeti explains how he was trying to achieve a textural work, apparently with no melodic sections, a decade before  Atmosph è res :

I first began to think about a kind of static music you find in Atmospheres and Apparitions in 1950; music wholly enclosed within itself, free of tunes, in which there are separate parts but they are not discernable, music that would change through gradual transformation almost as if it changed its color from the inside. 9

 Nonsense Madrigals

Rather than ignore the inadvertent humor associated with many of the bizarre sounds in electronic music, Ligeti welcomed and even exploited the humorous sounds. He also intentionally created sounds that were speech like. In that sense it may be seen t hat Ligeti brought a more sensual human element to a medium that w as generally seen as pure. Griffiths states that “Sounds and sound processes speak in their own language and do not need a higher language of tonal or serial ordering to make them mean.” 1 0

8 Ibid., 14. 9 Ibid., 33. 10 Griffiths, 27.

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Between the years 1962-65, Ligeti wrote a pair of works titled  Aventures and  Nouvelles Aventures . These two works are scored for soprano, alto, and baritone soloists with flute (doubling piccolo), horn, harpsichord, piano (doubling celesta), percussion, cello, and double bass. In these works, Ligeti returns to the ideas with which he experimented in  Artikulation  by the creation of speech-like sounds. Li geti has described

the work as “a kind of opera with the unfolding adventures of imaginary characters on an imaginary stage.” 1 1  He also uses an imaginary language: “I wrote my own text, whi ch is semantically meaningless and has only emotional content.” 1 2 Ligeti uses this material in  Aventures  and  Nouvelles Aventures  to depict an enormous range of emotions; Liget i has human voices making sounds, not words in a way that expresses various emotional states vividly and dramatically:

Each stream consists of a number of separat ed episodes (seven to eleven per stream), and each episode has its own very distinctive expressive character (e.g. mystical, idyllic, nostalgic, funereal, redeemed, excited, ironic, erotic, becalmed, humorous, hypocritical, cold, indifferent, triumphant, pathetic, stupid, hysterical, emotional, startled, fiery, exalted, anxious, unrestrained, mannered-ornamental, malicious, etc., etc.)” 1 3

 Aventures  and  Nouvelles Aventures  and its concept were influential in

the third movement of the  Nonsense Madrigals  written over twenty years later.

The  Nonsense Madrigals  began with a commission by the English male vocal sextet The King’s Singers. The first performance, in four movements, took place on September 25, 1988 at the Berlin Festival 11 Ibid., 41. 12 Ligeti, 45. 13 Griffiths, 43-44.

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Week. After this performance, Ligeti decided that the work was not complete and that it required additional movements. A fifth movement was added and received i ts performance by The King’s Singers on October 28, 1989 at London’s Queen El izabeth Hall as part of  the Ligeti by Ligeti Festival. Four years later, Ligeti added a sixth movement dedicated to two of its members, Simon Carrington and Alastair Hume, both of whom were leaving the ensemble after having been part of the ensemble for twenty five years. This final movement was performed on November 27, 1993 as part of the Huddersfield Festival.

With  Nonsense Madrigals , Ligeti tried to find his own mothertongue, a true language to employ in his works:

I am ceaselessly looking for my idiom without ever finding it: I am always doing something new. […] I bel ieve the  Nonsense  Madrigals  are a success. Actually, I only accept the pi ano é tudes

and the  Nonsense  Madrigals , the other works are a different story. However, I am still looking for means of expression. […] Now I would like to find a language which is really worth something. This is no false modesty, I am being honest. 1 4

14 András Varga, 56.

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Musical Style of  Atmosph è res and  Nonsense Madrigals.

The term Textural Music came from an article that Var è se wrote called “Weberns Melodik” in 1966. He said that, with Pointillism (fragmentation of line), Webern created a new “global” texture in which independent colors and intervals are united and combined in order to generate a large static mass. Ligeti was highly influenced by Var è se, and music created with a mass of sound became his most distinctive feature. In one of his interviews, he explains how he decide to embrace Textural Music in his style:

I was captivated by this music: immobile, with no rhythm and no melody. I had to take one step furt her and renounce harmony as well. That is how I arrived at constructing clusters. 1 5

The sound masses of  Atmospheres  are not simply tone clusters as one might see in the music of Penderecki, but rather the result of a technique that Ligeti had been cultivating for several years, what he has called “micropolyphony”

15 Ibid., 31.

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Technically speaking I have always approached musical texture through part-writing... but you cannot actually hear the polyphony, the canon. You hear a kind of impenetrable texture, something like a very densely woven cobweb. I retained melodic l ines in the process of composition, they are governed by rul es as strict as Palestrina’s or those of the Flemish school, but the rules of this polyphony are worked out by me. The polyphonic str ucture does not actually come through, you cannot hear it; it remains hidden in a microscopic, under-water world, to us inaudible. I call it micropolyphony. 1 6

The sound masses from micropolyphony are the result of woven chromatic lines. In the case of  Atmospheres , this chromatic canon, as it were, is at times as many as forty-eight parts. 1 7 With micropolyphony, one hears the overall texture, rather than the individual lines as in traditional contrapuntal contexts. Ligeti often makes the analogy of micropolyphony to Renaissance polyphony, especially the dense canonic writing of Ockeghem:

To this day, I am more interested in Ockeghem than Palestrina, because his music does not tend towards culminating points. Just as one voice approaches a climax another voice comes to counteract it, like waves in the sea. The unceasing continuity of Ockeghem’s music, a progress without development , was one point of departure for me to think in terms of impenetrable textures of sound.

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In one of his interviews with Marina Lobanova in 1991, he mentions again how important was for him Ockeghem’s music and how he

16 Ligeti, 14-15. 17 Griffiths, 35. 18 Ligeti, 26.

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influenced him, in order to create music with a constant stream, a continual flow:

…The idea was to work with Palestrina’s, Josquin’s or Ockeghem’s notions (I was very much infl uenced by Ockeghem at the time), but using clusters in order to obtain this special iridescent colour.”

“Ockeghem was the most important immediate source for technique. Unlike Josquin and Lasso, and later Palestrina, Ockeghem – and also Obrecht, only I was not acquainted wi th him at the time – writes musi c which is like a constant stream, a continual flow: there are no climaxes, only an unchanging tension. And it’s stasis! It is always flowing, yet remains like an expanse of  water which preserves its shape… That was the ide a, and it came from Ockeghem. 1 9

The fact that Ligeti wrote  Nonsense Madrigals  shows again how influenced he was by Renaissance polyphony. This can be considered a polystylistic approach, because it is a mixture of a Renaissance genre, the Madrigal, with a new way of composition, Textural music (Especially in the third movement, analyzed later, The Alphabet, where the statism is achieved with clusters). Ligeti said that he considered his works as polystylistic often:

-You have also said that there’s somethi ng of Wagner and Debussy in  Atmosph è res ,  Lontano , and some of your other earlier works. -[…] more than allusion, it was polystylistic. Not all that far from Ives in fact: Ives was the embodiment of polystylistics and the simple assembly of preconstructed parts. 2 0

19 Lobanova, 365. 20 Lobanova, 363.

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In addition, the themes are an utter nonsense, as exemplified by the movements with text from Carroll’s  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . The most unique movement is the third movement in which the text is nothing but the individual letters of the English alphabet. Ligeti’s interest in Lewis Car roll goes back at least as far as 1968, the year of his Second String Quartet.

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 Ligeti said in one of his interviews what

aspects of Carroll’s work interested him:

The sort of mathematical games and nonsense subjects t hat I like can also be found in Lewis Carroll. I’ve always been interested in mathematics, particularly in more paradoxical and beautiful sides and the aesthetics of the mathematical way of thinking. […] The beauty of such “absurd” problems can also be found in li terature. So, Lewis Carroll, Ionesco, Bor ges, topology – as well as many other areas of mathematics – are all interconnected… 2 2

It is interesting how it seems that Ligeti is aware of the the variety shown in his music:

Complex structures – order, chaos, l abyrinths and spirals – have a great symbolic importance in my music. Branching structures of the type seen in trees, street intersections, street maps of large cities, complex, labyrinthine gardens, spider’s webs, fishing nets, tissues and textures are also important. Consistency is important for my music too – hard, soft, sticky, wet – and then currents, turbulences, colours and light, both bright and dark… But I wouldn’t associate any of these with specific ages. Besides, I don’t think in aesthetic categories when I compose – I think in terms of form, consistency, colour and light, and of sound than is both colour and light… 2 3 21 Griffiths, 74. 22 Lobanova, 380. 23 Ibid., 374.

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 Therefore, in  Nonsense Madrigals, one can find how Renaissance music is combined with music created wi th a mass of sound, and coated with an aura of nonsense.

In 1957, Ligeti was assisting Gottfried Michael Koenig in the electronic music studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne for the realization of a piece called  Essay . In 1961, Ligeti wrote  Atmosph è res, but the work on the orchestral piece was previously interrupted for the profit of another electronic piece called  Artikulation   which thereafter became Pi è ce é l ectronique N.2.  In addition, it is interesting to note that Pi è ce é l ectronique N.3 . (1957), was formerly called  Atmosph è res

but in 1961, when Ligeti started the piece for large orchestra, he used that title for the orchestra piece and re-named the electronic piece Pi è ce é l ectronique N.3. In his essay  Musique et Technique , Ligeti relates that

when two of his orchestral compositions  Atmosph è res  and  Apparitions were first performed, in 1961 and 1960, several listeners thought there were loudspeakers disseminated in between the performers. 2 4 The illusion was caused by the composer using techniques he already worked on in the Electronic Music Studio of Cologne, techniques he successfully adapted to instrumental music. However,  Atmosph è res has been considered by Ligeti as a piece influenced by orchestral music wrote before, such as the Prelude to  Rheingold, in Debussy and also in Bart ó k. 2 5  About these works, Ligeti said:

I think that the Prelude to  Rheingold  with its static surfaces was the model for  Atmosph è res . I grasped this idea very ear ly on. So then: Feuerzauber   as an unbelievably magical fluctuation… This brings me back to my analogies with fractal geometry and chaos research. The possibility of imagining music not as melody, 24 Mehmet Okonşar, Micropolyphony: Motivations and Justifications Behind a Concept Introduced by György Ligeti, 12 25 Duchesneau and Marx, 131.

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polyphony or contrapuntal structures, but as fluctuation, as “thick” and “thin”, “dark” and “light” areas, and as threads and knots which can oscillate like a spider’s web – this actually derives from the orchestral vision of Berlioz and Wagner and resembles the path taken by coloristic painting on its journey towards Impressionism (Turner versus Monet, for example). You see it in a different way with Debussy too, and I continued quit e consciously in the same vein as Wagner and Debussy… Remarkably enough, pieces like  Atmosph è res , which I composed in 1961, appeared at almost

exactly the same time as the “atmospheric” research that Edward Lorenz published in 1962. The two things are not directly connected, but in both of them you can see the same patter n: fluctuation and current. So it is here that I can see the parallels between what I did (and not only I , but other people as well: I am thinking of Nancarrow’s polyrhythm, etc.) 2 6

Musical Discussion

Analysis of Melodic and Harmonic Aspects

 Atmosph è res and The Alphabet share a similiar melodic approach. In

textural music, the mass of sound is more important that a single melody. Although it is possible to find melodic lines inside this block of sound, their purpose is not is not to sound above the rest. In The Alphabet , the composer seeks static sonorities, in order to create clusters. However, it is possible to find some melodic inflections, as in mm. 34, Alto I, or mm. 40-42, Alto I/II. In  Atmosph è res , melodic lines cannot be heard individually, because the prevail ing idea is a mass of sound. Lines are interlaced in order to create micropolyphony. Therefore, it is possible to identify melodic patterns in  Atmosph è res , for example in m. 44 (Violin I,1), but as one component of the 48-voice micropolyphony, with the 26 Lobanova, 369.

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same importance as the others. In The Alphabet , it is possible to observe that a single pitch, or set of pitches, is assigned to each letter of the alphabet, being more evident during the first five letters. The letter “Ef” is not employed. The reason for this is that the audible difference in pronunciation compared to the other nearby letters would affect the sound created with the [i] vowel-based letters (ei, bi, si, di, i). Although there are similarities, such as an elaborated chromaticism and a non-tonal purpose, it is possible to identify some differences concerning harmony between the vocal and instrumental piece. In The Alphabet , there is not a tonality but it is built under tonal centers. In m. 36, for example, there is an Eb minor triad in second inversion with the dynamic marking fppp. In m. 49, the upper voices create a C minor triad in second inversion wi th the dynamic marking ffff f. Also, the piece ends on a C Major 7,9 chord. In  Atmosph è res , the music is devoid of any harmonic or melodic progression, and there are not t onal centers. Because of the developed chromaticism, it is easy to identify chromatic lines inside the micropolyphonic environment. Sometimes, the chromatic lines form canons with not necessarily the same pitches, becoming “chromatic canon,” as seen in mm. 32-33, for example. As seen, t he vocal work tends to have a reminiscence of tonality, unlike the orchestral piece.

Rhythm

In both pieces, the sonorities produced with clusters move in a slow harmonic rhythm. In The Alphabet , the first sound block created with C#B, lasts 10 measures until th e next cluster appears with a D#, overlapping with the previous one. But in this work, the harmonic rhythm is speeded up during mm. 36-49. The note durations become shorter gradually.  Atmosph è res  can be considered “timeless music”, because there is no concept of beginning or end. The instruments enter almost imperceptibly, as showed in mm. 43-44. If the voices are analyzed individually, it is easy to find a great variety of rhythm, for example in

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mm. 23-29, but being a part of the overall design, which gives the impression that there is no tempo. In The Alphabet , the tempo and time signature written in the score remain the same during the entire work. However, in  Atmosph è res , there are some time signature changes (mm. 44,77,82,83) and tempo changes (mm.40,44,70).

Accompaniment and Musical Material

In The Alphabet , there is no formal accompaniment. All the voices have the same importance. This idea of evenness can also be observed in the micropolyphony of  Atmosph è res . Each instrument is treated individually (m.44, cello section). Multiple melodies form clusters, without the leadership of one particular element. The cluster notation shows that all voice motions are neutralizing each other, projecting a static soundcloud. However, it is possibl e to find some places in both pieces were there is an accompanimental purpose. In The Alphabet , there is more melodic independence in mm. 46-47, and we can interpret certain voices as a pedal point, sustaining the other voices with more significance. In  Atmosph è res , there is a repeated use of a brief motif, formed by the notes

C-D-C#-D#, in mm.44-46 (violins). As seen, the structure and outer frame of the music remains unchanged, while the inner sounds (pitches, rhythms, timbre changes) are changing.

Form

In The Alphabet , the dynamics during the piece can establi sh a dynamic structure following the pattern:  pppp-ffffff-pp . Therefore, the piece can be divided into three parts, shown the next structure:

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In  Atmosph è res , it is also possible to recognize a dynamic structure, as showed in this graphic time-intensity of the whole piece:

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 Atmosph è res and The Alphabet   give the impression that time has stopped.

This requires that the structure is based on the dynamics through the pieces rather than in the development of thematic elements.

Texture

In contrast to more traditional musical textures, the concept of a sound mass in these works minimizes the importance of individual pitches in preference for texture, timbre, and dynamics as primary shapers of gesture and impact. The texture in The Alphabet   can be considered homophonic, especially at the beginning and end of the piece. Counterpoint is employed during the section where chromaticism is more evident, as in mm. 44-49.  Atmosph è res  is one of the clearest examples for textural music. Separated musical lines create a homogeneous surface, minutely detailed and vitalized by the activity beneath. This is 27 Okonşar, 30.

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achieved with clusters. With micropolyphony, an overall texture is heard rather than individual lines like in traditional counterpoint. Both pieces use canon technique. In The Alphabet , the voices start in groups of 2, but they are becoming more individual during the development of the work. The idea of clusters is combined w ith canon technique in  Atmosph è res . It is possible to see clusters in canon, f or example in mm. 32-33. Dynamics in  Atmosph è res  are often written into separated sections, creating the illusion of “dynamic counterpoint” (mm. 44-49).

Sound: Orchestration, Timbre, Dynamics

 Atmosph è res  was originally conceived as an electronic piece, but Ligeti

considered that he did not have enough tools to create the work that he wanted. Therefore, he reinvented the orchestra as a site of endless potential for sonic exploration. It seems like Ligeti enjoyed leading classical ensembles to the extreme. The most extreme change of register in The Alphabet   is founded in m.49 (the lower three voices). This contrast can be considered similar to mm. 36-44 in  Atmosph è res , where, as Griffiths describes, “screeching high piccolos are cut off and answered by double basses from six octaves below.”

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The tessitura is very difficult in The Alphabet . In the opening measures especially, the voices must sustain tones which are occasionally in extremes of the range for long moments of time at very soft dynamics, and with clear and unwavering intonation. In The Alphabet , the problems of tessitura are augmented by Ligeti’s dynamic scheme in which the opening is marked  pppp  and later, in m. 49, the Baritone II and Bass sing an F#2 marked  ffffff . The tessitura is higher when t he tension increases. As seen, the idea of a piece that ranges f rom  pppp to  ffffff  is in itself rather nonsensical, and these madrigals are based on nonsense. Such indications require a certain degree of thoughtful imagination on the part of the performer. 28 Griffiths, 37.

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It is important to consider the idiomatic quality of the vocal writing. In The Alphabet , letters with similar pronunciation are employed together in

order to create a specific sonority (m. 23). Returning to orchestral characteristics in  Atmosph è res , the whole sections are written exclusively with neighbor tones (half and whole, mm.44-48), being the few jumps (m. 49 violin I-14) for shifting the line back to the range of the instrument. Sometimes, a chord is held during a long period. The pitches remain the same, but various instrumental groups rise and fall in volume during this employment of clusters. This aspect can be seen in mm. 1-8. The string section is always notated  pppp , imperceptible attack, except for some relevant places, as in m. 40, in the double-basses cluster. Micropolyphony in  Atmosph è res  is used as an expressive element. Individual notes, although not discernable on their own, create the characteristics of the “color,” “shape,” and “inner activity” of the soundscape.

Text ( The Alphabet   Only)

Although the piece has a text to be sung, thi s text in The Alphabet  is meaningless semantically. There is not a poetic text. Because of the lack of any semantic meaning, this madri gal can be viewed as the most nonsensical of the set. With a lack of meaning, the effect of t he piece is both humorous and serious. As Griffiths says, “Indeed, one of the most distinctive features of his output is the  Aventures  principle: that music has words (expressive gestures) but no language.” 2 9 This  Aventures principle is the heart of The Alphabet . The letters of the alphabet are written phonetically (Ei, Bi, Si, Di, I, Ef…). However, some letters seem to have a specific meaning, because they are written in strategic clusters (notice how Ligeti uses the letter “wai” in m.52, as if it were a question (“wai”-why). In addition, the composer uses question marks or 29 Griffiths, 45.

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exclamations to reinforce the intention of each cluster. The concept of setting the alphabet to music for purely aesthetic purposes might be considered humorous (and humor is certainly an important part of the  Nonsense Madrigals ). In The Alphabet   Ligeti seems to juxtapose

emotional depth with humor.

CONCLUSION

With  Atmosph è res , Ligeti created an extremely interesting orchestral scoring. Micropolyphony is what makes Ligeti’s textural music apart. Many lines of dense canons move at the same time, t hus resulting in clusters vertically, instead of individual melodic lines. Micropolyphony is a technique experimented in the electronic-music studio and then adapted to orchestral writing. Ligeti used his electronic-music studio experiments in such a creative way. His orchestral works are the result of 

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what he learned in electronic music. The work done in the WDR, RAI and ORTF music research studios have been immensely i mportant in the evolution of the present day’s music language. While some composers like Boulez, Messiaen, abandoned electronic music, others like Berio, Nono, Stockhausen had a predilection for this language.

Ligeti’s compositional style in  Nonsense Madrigals is a parody of compositional techniques from the 14th century as well as the rhythmic provocativeness of jazz. The use of parody in these works is compatible with Ligeti’s choice of texts which includes literary parodies by Lewis Carroll.

In The  Alphabet , Ligeti seems to be influenced by his own earlier music. This piece is very much in the styl e of  Lux Aeterna  and  Atmosph è res in its slowly evolving sound mass. The opening, i n fact is very much like the opening of  Lux Aeterna  in that both pieces start  pp  from a single core from which the texture slowly increases. As seen, The Alphabet has some extreme changes of register that seem to be reminiscences of  Atmosph è res . Also, both works share a slow sense of moving. There is

not a reference of beginning or end. The Alphabet   could be considered as a pastiche of Ligeti’s style from the 1960s, with  Atmosph è res and  Lux  Aeterna . The almost static sustained quality marked by the slow build up

of sonorities in a canonic-like method is a return to sound masses, found in works like  Atmospheres  and  Lux Aeterna . These two works from the 1960s, has in the 1980s, returned in a context of nonsense. Bibliography

Andr á s Varga, B á lint. “Interviews, Gy ö rgy Ligeti” In From Boulanger to Stockhausen: interviews and a memoir. University of Rochester Press,

2013.

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Duchesneau, Louise, and Wolfgang Marx. Gy ö rgy Ligeti: Of Foreign  Lands and Strange Sounds. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011.

Griffiths, Paul. Gyorgy Ligeti . London: Robson Books, 1983.

Ligeti, Gy ö rgy. Gy ö rgy Ligeti in Conversation with P é t er Varnai, Josef  H ä usler, Claude Samuel and Himself . Translated into English by Gabor

J. Schabert, Sarah E. Soulsby, Terence Kilmartin, and Geoffrey Skelton. London: Eulenberg Books, 1983.

Lobanova, Marina N. Gy ö rgy Ligeti: style, ideas, poetics, trans. Mark Suttleworth. Berlin: Verlag Ernst Kuhn, 2002.

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