Ligeti Nonsense Madrigals and Atmospheres

Research Project

Discussion of a Composer and Two Compositions

György Ligeti

Atmosphères

Nonsense Madrigals (The Alphabet)

Pablo Martinez Martinez

Seminar in Twentieth-Century Music

MUSI 5338.01

Index

Proposal 3

Historical Context of Ligeti and his Works 5

Atmosphères 7

Nonsense Madrigals 8

Musical Style of Atmosphères and Nonsense Madrigals 11

Musical Discussion 16

Analysis of Melodic and Harmonic Aspects 16

Rhythm 17

Accompaniment and Musical Material 17

Form 18

Texture 19

Sound: Orchestration, Timbre, Dynamics 19

Text (The Alphabet only) 21

Conclusion 22

Biography 23

2

György 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 sensationalism.” 1 Through this project,

I expect to find what aspects in Ligeti’s musical style are considered

innovative in his works Atmosphères and Nonsense Madrigals.

The orchestral work Atmosphères was written in 1961, and Ligeti

dedicated it to Mátyás Seiber (1905-60), a friend and Hungarian

composer who lived in the West and who had died in a car accident in

1960. Ligeti had wanted to write a requiem since 1956. As Harald

Kaufmann points out in 1969, with Atmosphères, 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 perception.” 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 Atmosphères 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

changes, etc. in a block of sound. The result obtained is a texture like

currents, turbulences, chaos, labyrinths and spirals. This mass of sound

is moved trough the pieces with canon writing. In Atmosphères and

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.

3

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 origin of clusters. As

the entries of the new lines 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 Atmosphères and Nonsense Madrigals.

I will explain where these works are located stylistically. Nonsense

Madrigals combines the Renaissance polyphony, textural music, and

nonsense text. Atmosphères 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.

Historical context of Ligeti and his works

4

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. 3 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 Jünglinge , 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 leave Budapest. Stockhausen had arranged

for a scholarship to be granted to Ligeti to study at the electronic music

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

the west:

The railway people organized trains 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

3 Paul Griffiths, György Ligeti, (London: Robson Books, 1983), 14.4 Ibid., 22.

5

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 border. 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 office, 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 quite dangerous, because there

was a three-year old child with 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 with rockets. We knew we had reached the

border when we fell into the mud where the mines had been. 5

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

scene. He went to the Electronic Music Studio of Cologne where he

began experimenting with electronic music.

Atmosphères

5 Griffiths, 24.

6

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

Atmosphères but later known as Pièce Électronique 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 Atmosphères 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. 7

Ligeti’s next major work for large orchestra was Atmosphères in 1961.

He described the piece as “floating, fluctuating sound.” 8 Atmosphères

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 Atmosphères :

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 Péter Varnai, Josef Häusler, Claude Samuel and Himself. Translated into English by Gabor J. Schabert, Sarah E. Soulsby, Terence Kilmartin, and Geoffrey Skelton (London: Eulenberg Books, 1983), 8.

8 Ibid., 14.

7

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 that Ligeti brought a more

sensual human element to a medium that was 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

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. Ligeti 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, which 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; Ligeti has human voices making sounds,

9 Ibid., 33.10 Griffiths, 27.11 Ibid., 41.12 Ligeti, 45.

8

not words in a way that expresses various emotional states vividly and

dramatically:

Each stream consists of a number of separated 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

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 its performance by The King’s

Singers on October 28, 1989 at London’s Queen Elizabeth 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 believe the Nonsense

13 Griffiths, 43-44.

9

Madrigals are a success. Actually, I only accept the piano études

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

Musical Style of Atmosphères and Nonsense Madrigals.

The term Textural Music came from an article that Varèse 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 Varèse, and

14 András Varga, 56.

10

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 further 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”

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 lines in the

process of composition, they are governed by rules as strict as

Palestrina’s or those of the Flemish school, but the rules of this

polyphony are worked out by me. The polyphonic structure does

not actually come through, you cannot hear it; i t 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:

15 Ibid., 31.16 Ligeti, 14-15.17 Griffiths, 35.

11

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 , l ike 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. 1 8

In one of his interviews with Marina Lobanova in 1991, he mentions

again how important was for him Ockeghem’s music and how he

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 influenced 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 with him

at the time – writes music 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 idea, 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

18 Ligeti, 26.19 Lobanova, 365.

12

achieved with clusters). Ligeti said that he considered his works as

polystylistic often:

-You have also said that there’s something of Wagner and Debussy

in Atmosphères , 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

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 Carroll goes back at least as far as 1968, the year of his

Second String Quartet. 2 1 Ligeti said in one of his interviews what

aspects of Carroll’s work interested him:

The sort of mathematical games and nonsense subjects that 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 literature.

So, Lewis Carroll, Ionesco, Borges, 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, labyrinths and spirals – have a

great symbolic importance in my music. Branching structures of

the type seen in trees, street intersections, street maps of large

20 Lobanova, 363.21 Griffiths, 74.22 Lobanova, 380.

13

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

Therefore, in Nonsense Madrigals, one can find how Renaissance music

is combined with music created with 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 Atmosphères,

but the work on the orchestral piece was previously interrupted for the

profit of another electronic piece called Artikulation which thereafter

became Pièce électronique N.2. In addition, it is interesting to note that

Pièce électronique N.3 . (1957), was formerly called Atmosphères

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 Pièce

électronique N.3. In his essay Musique et Technique , Ligeti relates that

when two of his orchestral compositions Atmosphères 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, Atmosphères has been

considered by Ligeti as a piece influenced by orchestral music wrote

23 Ibid., 374.24 Mehmet Okonşar, Micropolyphony: Motivations and Justifications Behind a Concept

Introduced by György Ligeti, 12

14

before, such as the Prelude to Rheingold, in Debussy and also in

Bartók. 2 5 About these works, Ligeti said:

I think that the Prelude to Rheingold with its static surfaces was

the model for Atmosphères . I grasped this idea very early 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,

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 quite consciously in the same

vein as Wagner and Debussy… Remarkably enough, pieces like

Atmosphères , 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 pattern:

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

Atmosphères 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

25 Duchesneau and Marx, 131.26 Lobanova, 369.

15

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 Atmosphères , melodic lines cannot be heard

individually, because the prevailing idea is a mass of sound. Lines are

interlaced in order to create micropolyphony. Therefore, it is possible to

identify melodic patterns in Atmosphères , for example in m. 44 (Violin

I,1), but as one component of the 48-voice micropolyphony, with the

same importance as the others. In The Alphabet , i t 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 with

the dynamic marking fffff. Also, the piece ends on a C Major 7,9 chord.

In Atmosphères , the music is devoid of any harmonic or melodic

progression, and there are not tonal 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, the 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 the next cluster appears with a D#,

overlapping with the previous one. But in this work, the harmonic

16

rhythm is speeded up during mm. 36-49. The note durations become

shorter gradually. Atmosphères 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

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 Atmosphères , 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 Atmosphères . 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 sound-

cloud. However, it is possible 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

Atmosphères , 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 establish a dynamic

structure following the pattern: pppp-ffffff-pp . Therefore, the piece can

be divided into three parts, shown the next structure:

17

In Atmosphères , i t is also possible to recognize a dynamic structure, as

showed in this graphic time-intensity of the whole piece:

2 7

Atmosphères 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. Atmosphères is one of the clearest examples

27 Okonşar, 30.

18

for textural music. Separated musical lines create a homogeneous

surface, minutely detailed and vitalized by the activity beneath. This is

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 with canon technique in Atmosphères . It

is possible to see clusters in canon, for example in mm. 32-33. Dynamics

in Atmosphères are often written into separated sections, creating the

illusion of “dynamic counterpoint” (mm. 44-49).

Sound: Orchestration, Timbre, Dynamics

Atmosphères 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 Atmosphères , where,

as Griffiths describes, “screeching high piccolos are cut off and

answered by double basses from six octaves below.” 2 8

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 the tension increases.

As seen, the idea of a piece that ranges from 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.

19

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 Atmosphères , 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 Atmosphères 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, this text in The Alphabet is

meaningless semantically. There is not a poetic text. Because of the lack

of any semantic meaning, this madrigal can be viewed as the most

nonsensical of the set. With a lack of meaning, the effect of the 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

exclamations to reinforce the intention of each cluster. The concept of

setting the alphabet to music for purely aesthetic purposes might be

29 Griffiths, 45.

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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 Atmosphères , 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, thus 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

what he learned in electronic music. The work done in the WDR, RAI

and ORTF music research studios have been immensely important in the

evolution of the present day’s music language. While some composers

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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 style of Lux Aeterna and Atmosphères in

its slowly evolving sound mass. The opening, in 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

Atmosphères . 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 Atmosphères 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

András Varga, Bálint. “Interviews, György Ligeti” In From Boulanger to

Stockhausen: interviews and a memoir. University of Rochester Press,

2013.

Duchesneau, Louise, and Wolfgang Marx. György Ligeti: Of Foreign

Lands and Strange Sounds. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011.

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

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Ligeti, György. György Ligeti in Conversation with Péter Varnai, Josef

Häusler, 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. György Ligeti: style, ideas, poetics, trans. Mark

Suttleworth. Berlin: Verlag Ernst Kuhn, 2002.

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