Ligeti and the Disorders of Perception

By Alvaro Martínez León

Ligeti was born in 1923 in Transylvania (Romania), in a family of Hungarian and Jewish origins. Despite having suffered the discriminations of his time (first as a Hungarian in Romania and later as a Jew during the Second World War) he succeeded his first years of musical studies at the conservatory of Cluj. At the end of the war, during which half of his family died in concentration camps, he moved to Budapest to study composition. He would write his early works in the Hungarian capital, heavily influenced by the style of Bartok.

The Transilvanian composer didn’t have access to music that had been written in Europe after Bartok and Stravinsky. Increasingly constrained by the communist dictatorship, which prevented any "modern" works to be played in concert, Ligeti established contact with Stockhausen and Eimert requesting them information on the music that was being produced in Western Europe. Just before the arrival of scores and recordings of electronic music to his hands, the revolution of 1956 broke out in Budapest and the composer escaped from Hungary to Vienna. He was received in Cologne by Stockhausen and Eimert, who gave him the opportunity to work in the electronic music studio of Cologne and a scholarship that would enable him to survive.

Before his departure from Budapest, Ligeti had already started the first experiments that would lead to the conception of his new style. Denying his status as a successor to Bartok, he began to imagine music made of static blocks, where melody, harmony and rhythm would no longer exist. As he would say twenty years later, thanks to work done at the studio of Cologne he found the writing technique that would allow him to create what he would call later “micropolyphony”.

Upon his arrival in Cologne, Ligeti discovered serialism, which was then dominant in Germany. It didn’t take him long to challenge an aesthetic doctrine that he found deviated from its principles. Serialism, inspired by mathematical theories on the organization of the universe, had become “a combinatorial system that does not consider sound result". Ligeti decided to try to build sound images inspired by natural phenomena of his interest. Thus, his work at Studio of Cologne began by focusing on human acoustic perception.

One of the main discoveries for the development of his language is the perceptive threshold of audition. The human ear is able to differentiate distinct sound events up to 1 / 20 of a second. If one hears sounds that would succeed at a higher speed, we end up perceiving a static "texture". This is what happens when we perceive the rain approaching: First we hear the drops falling one by one, and gradually as the frequency of drops increases, we distinguish less and less drops separately. Once the rain covers us completely, we hear a "texture" sound. This resembles to what happens when watching a wheel spin. At slow speed we see the circular movement of spokes, but as rotation accelerates, we could say that the wheel does not move.

The sound texture would become a regular feature in the language of Ligeti, as well as the transition between texture and distinct sound event. To build these static blocks and transitions, the composer superimposes a high number of layers of sound to create a thick fabric than can be manipulated depending on the musical intention he wishes to produce. Through these operations, textures may evolve in terms of pitch, timbre and dynamics, creating continuous transitions. Three examples (among others) are to be mentioned in this kind of approach:

-Atmosphères : succession of textures

-The beginning of Ramifications: progression between a texture (clusters made of high pitches) and a distinct sound event (a single note).

-3rd movement of 2nd string quartet: construction in rhythmic layers and transitions between homorythmic and rhythmic textures.

The cognitive perception level is associated to an “emotional” perception level. Ligeti criticized integral serialism for the excess of information in musical speech. This saturation of musical events was already challenged by the composer with his sound textures, which evolve slowly carried by a elastic time motion. Nevertheless, the Hungarian composer will create in Aventures contrasting passages where saturation of events is followed by moments of total immobile moments. These overcharged passages are what he called “music for funambulists”, where the boundaries of musicians’ technical possibilities are carried over to an extreme degree. As a result, the interpretation is carried by tension, being intense expression and sensation of danger the main goals. The Hungarian composer would use this overcharged moments to contrast them with intervals of total contemplation of sound. Thus, we can say that some of his works are structured by contrasts between saturated and restful perception. This procedure can be found in Aventures, in the first movement of the 2nd string quartet, or in the Requiem.

At the beginning of the 70s, Ligeti discovers Conlon Nancarrow’s music and American minimalist stream. They fascinate him. This will lead him to explore the superposition of rhythmic layers, inspired as well by Pygmies’ music. However, this new creative period of the composer deserves another article…