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Extended Program Notes For: Ligeti's Sonata for Solo Cello

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Extended Program Notes For: Ligeti's Sonata for Solo Cello Southern Illinois University Carbondale OpenSIUC Research Papers Graduate School 2017 Extended Program Notes for: Ligeti’s Sonata for Solo Cello; Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano; Rachmaninoff’s Sonata for Piano and Cello Op. 19 Byron Farrar Southern Illinois University Carbondale, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/gs_rp Recommended Citation Farrar, Byron. "Extended Program Notes for: Ligeti’s Sonata for Solo Cello; Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano; Rachmaninoff’s Sonata for Piano and Cello Op. 19." (Jan 2017). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at OpenSIUC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Research Papers by an authorized administrator of OpenSIUC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. EXTENDED PROGRAM NOTES FOR: LIGETI’S SONATA FOR SOLO CELLO; DEBUSSY’S SONATA FOR CELLO AND PIANO; AND RACHMANINOFF’S SONATA FOR CELLO AND PIANO OP. 19 by Byron Farrar B.M., University of Louisville, 2011 A Research Paper Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Music School of Music in the Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale May 2017 REASERCH PAPER APPROVAL EXTENDED PROGRAM NOTES FOR: LIGETI’S SONATA FOR SOLO CELLO; DEBUSSY’S SONATA FOR CELLO AND PIANO; AND RACHMANINOFF’S SONATA FOR CELLO AND PIANO, OP. 19 By Byron Farrar A Research Paper Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Music in the field of Music Approved by: Eric Lenz, Chair Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale 4/12/2017 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ ii CHAPTERS CHAPTER 1 – LIGETI .......................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 – DEBUSSY ..................................................................................................6 CHAPTER 3 – RACHMANINOFF ..................................................................................12 CHAPTER 4 – COMMONALITY....................................................................................17 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………. 21 VITA…………………………………………………………………….……………………… 23 i LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE PAGE Figure 1 ............................................................................................................................................3 Figure 2 ............................................................................................................................................3 Figure 3 ..........................................................................................................................................10 Figure 4 ..........................................................................................................................................11 Figure 5 ..........................................................................................................................................14 Figure 6 ..........................................................................................................................................15 Figure 7 ..........................................................................................................................................18 Figure 8 ..........................................................................................................................................19 Figure 9 ..........................................................................................................................................19 Figure 10 ........................................................................................................................................19 ii 1 CHAPTER 1 LIGETI Of the three composers discussed in this paper, György Ligeti was the most harmonically radical. He will forever have a chapter in future music history textbooks reserved for him and Penderecki as pioneers of the sound mass. While Ligeti is most noted for creating experimental and innovative music, his early works draw heavily from Hungarian folk music similar to his compatriot and idol, Béla Bartók. The Sonata for Solo Violoncello is one of these earlier works still rooted in tonality and fairly conservative compared with much of Ligeti’s output. However, at the time of composition it was considered too radical to be published and did not become part of the standard cello repertoire until the 1990s.1 Both of Ligeti’s parents were Jewish Hungarians, which played a large impact on Ligeti’s youth. He was born in a small town called Dicsozentmarton in Transylvania where his parents had settled during World War I2. When Ligeti turned six his family moved to Cluj, the cultural center of Transylvania, where his father wanted him to study physics at university3. However, heavy anti-Jewish sentiments had swept the area leading up to World War II making it difficult for Jews to be admitted in science fields, so Ligeti’s father allowed him to study music composition4. There he studied under Ferenc Farkas until January of 1944, when he was drafted 1 Richard Toop, György Ligeti (London: Phaidon, 1999), 39. 2 Ibid. 10 3 Robert W. Richart, György Ligeti: A Bio-Bibliography (New York, NY: Greenwood Press, 1990), 3. 4 Ibid. 2 as part of the Forced Labor Services. As cruel as his forced conscription into the army was, it perhaps saved Ligeti’s life. The rest of his family was taken to Auschwitz with only his mother surviving. After the war ended Ligeti moved to Budapest to further pursue his compositional studies. It was here that he composed his Sonata for Solo Cello, the first movement in 1948 and the second in 1953. Dialogo The first movement, Dialogo, was composed while Ligeti was still enrolled at the Budapest Music Academy. The short piece was composed for his object of unrequited love, a fellow student cellist named Anouss Vranyi5. Being wholly unaware of the composers intentions she simply thanked him and never played it. The piece is structured as a conversation between a man and a woman, the lower register representing the man and the upper register representing the woman. Ligeti is quoted saying:6 It's a dialogue. Because it's like two people, a man and a woman, conversing. I used the C string, the G string and the A string separately... I had been writing much more "modern" music in 1946 and 1947, and then in '48 I began to feel that I should try to be more "popular"... I attempted in this piece to write a beautiful melody, with a typical Hungarian profile, but not a folksong... or only half, like in Bartók or in Kodály— actually, closer to Kodály. While several of the works preceding the sonata were fairly modern, Ligeti’s socialist inclinations influenced him during this period to write folk-like accessible music as is also 5 Richard Toop, György Ligeti (London: Phaidon, 1999), 28. 6 György Ligeti, Suites and Sonatas for Solo Cello, Matt Haimovitz, Duetsche Grammaphon, 1992, Compact disc, Liner notes by Steven Paul. 3 apparent in his choral works of the time7. While Budapest would soon after fall under Soviet control - and with it repressive rules for modern music - this was not a result of political pressures. The movement is extremely lyrical with bar lines only delineating phrases and not numbers of beats per measure. It consists of two different ostinato patterns representing the masculine as seen here: Fig. 1 and the feminine:8 Fig. 2 It might be interpreted from a historical standpoint as the shy awkward male composer and the lyrical, oblivious female cellist9. The ostinati go back and forth with the masculine beginning in the lower range of the cello and the feminine responding in the higher. The masculine is also always a lower dynamic, all but one iteration beginning piano while the feminine is consistently assigned a higher dynamic (all but one beginning forte). Ligeti manipulates the ostinati using 7 Richard Toop, György Ligeti (London: Phaidon, 1999), 29. 8 Louise Duchesneau and Wolfgang Marx, György Ligeti: of foreign lands and strange sounds (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 21. 9 Ibid. 4 tempo and dynamic changes, voice additions and phrase elongations10. This use of transformational ostinato is a technique that he would use in other works such as his Sonata for Solo Viola composed forty years later11. While there isn’t a functional harmonic key center of the movement, there is a general feeling of D being the tonic and themes being built on D-phrygian scales. The movement also features a technique frequently used by Bartok of pizzicato glissandi with the second pair of glissandi chords setting up an A-D dominant tonic relationship. Phrygian scales are used as well as dorian giving the movement a modal quality, possibly inspired by Hungarian folk music and Bartok. However the lyricism lends itself much more to his other early inspiration, Kodaly. The movement ends with the same chord it began with except a Picardy third. Capriccio The second movement titled Capriccio is more similar to Bartok’s aggressive, abrasive style. The title is derived from Paganini’s Caprices and marks the first instance of Ligeti’s fascination with Paganini’s virtuosic string writings.12 Ligeti composed the movement five years after the Dialogo when a well-known cellist, Vera Denes, approached him for a composition13. The meter is an unrelenting 3/8 that only breaks briefly in the middle of the
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