"Ligeti's myriad-minded life and work"

György Ligeti

Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, often provides me with inspiration. His latest post is about György Ligeti, the Hungarian composer who passed away in 2006. My title for this post quotes a phrase from Ross' discussion. Two interesting things I learned were that Ligeti disliked Luigi Nono for political reasons, but was a big fan of Supertramp, apparently for musical reasons. Let's hear Supertramp doing "Crime of the Century", one of Ligeti's favorites:

I think that is the first time I have heard that song. It came out in 1974. I missed that year because I was in Spain for most of it studying guitar. When I say "I missed that year" I mean that all I did was practice guitar. I probably memorized close to a page of music every day. No newspapers, no radio, no television, no movies. So I completely missed Richard Nixon and Watergate. And Supertramp. Listening now, about three minutes into the song I became terminally bored. But Ligeti liked it. He liked a lot of wildly different things as recounted by Ligeti's long-time assistant Louise Duschesneau:

Duchesneau herself surveys Ligeti's record collection, which contained vast quantities of non-Western music. She, too, notes Ligeti's fondness for Supertramp, reporting that the group's records Crime of the Century and Breakfast in America are mentioned alongside Balinese kecak music and the rumba band Los Papines...

I talk about a lot of different kinds of music on this blog, but reading about Ligeti and especially about his long struggle to write his third and fourth string quartets, is like a splash of cold water in the face and reminds me of the virtues of classicism.

Ligeti worked on these pieces from the early nineteen-eighties until around the year 2000, with the Arditti and Kronos quartets in mind, but, alas, neither work was finished.

Ross quotes Bianca Ţiplea Temeş on Ligeti's compositional process:

Ligeti sums up a rich array of extra-European musical influences of a wide geographical spread, stringing together rhythmic and melodic ideas from Burma, Uganda, Great Zimbabwe, Java-Bali, Cameroon, etc. Moreover, he crosses the frontier of art music by integrating references from the fine arts into his verbal sketches: "In Escher's footsteps," "Pinturas negras," "Alhambra ornaments," all articulating the image of a complex personality of twentieth-century culture and leaving unanswered for posterity the question of what String Quartets Nos. 3 and 4 might have sounded like.

Given this, I think I have a pretty good idea of what they might have sounded like: a dog's breakfast! Some composers engaged in this sort of myriad conglomeration in the late 1960s: Berio's Sinfonia is just one example. A more extreme one is Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu written between 1962 and 1966.

In Taruskin's phrase this is "a tissue of promiscuous quotation." Ligeti, struggling to find a new, perhaps more consonant style, after the total chromaticism of his earlier work, was listening to the whole world of musical styles, past and present, that recordings have made possible. This is pure speculation, but isn't it possible that he was just too good a composer to slap together an indigestible collage of musical styles as Berio and Zimmermann (and many others) did? After the Second String quartet which Wikipedia characterizes as belonging "to the great tradition of quartet writing, from the Classical masters to Berg and Bartók" perhaps Ligeti could not reconcile this kind of tradition with the stylistic circus that so many composers were attracted to in the 60s and 70s. Here is the first movement of Ligeti's String Quartet no. 2, written in 1968:

Whatever you might think of the music, one thing is sure: it is not a promiscuous collage of different styles. It is very tightly written. But Ligeti seems to have gotten the sense that music like this was now out of step with the times. The groovy 60s had an effect on all areas of music, even 'classical' composers who found themselves listening to Balinese music and Supertramp! Because, cool! Ligeti worked on his third and fourth string quartets from the early 1980s until around 2000, without success.


Is it so hard to understand that immersing yourself in a "rich array" of musical influences might be an interesting, perhaps even necessary, thing to do when you are young, but when you are fifty years old, it is a lot like buying a red sports car? Diversity may seem like a nice, harmless ideal, but when you are trying to write music, it is a deadly one. The two poles between which every composer has to find a middle ground are boring repetition and meaningless variety. The most skillful composers manage to strike a balance. The greatest of all court boring repetition but miraculously discover meaningful variety. Two examples: Bach, The Art of Fugue and Beethoven, Diabelli Variations.


Ligeti wrote a much-admired set of etudes for piano during the same years he struggled with the string quartets. Perhaps the discipline of the single instrument provided the necessary focus, warding off promiscuous diversity...

Read more »

Ligeti: Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes

I see on Alex Ross' blog that Ligeti's piece for 100 metronomes is about to be performed in New York. This piece dates from 1962 and therefore predates the similar work by Steve Reich titled Pendulum Music. Wikipedia has articles on both pieces here and here. In both cases the idea is to start a physical process that generates sound and to wait for the process to complete. In the piece by Ligeti the process is to wind up 100 of the old-fashioned metronomes, set them to different tempi and let them go simultaneously. At first there is a collision of many different ticks, but as they run down, slowly, we end up listening to just one metronome which finally stops. In the Steve Reich piece, several microphones are suspended above speakers pointing up and the levels are set so that there will be feedback when the microphone is just above the speaker. Then the microphones are set swinging. The piece ends when they have all stopped swinging and there is a continuous feedback. Here is the Ligeti piece:

And here is the one by Steve Reich:

Depending on the microphones, the speakers, the microphone chords and the amplifier, you can get different results:

Ligeti composed his piece as a criticism of trends in contemporary music. He said:

What bothers me nowadays are above all ideologies (all ideologies, in that they are stubborn and intolerant towards others), and Poème Symphonique is directed above all against them.

Steve Reich's piece, however, was an experiment in rhythm and, along with a couple of pieces using tape loops, led him to some new rhythmic possibilities. Both pieces are, I would suggest, neither interesting aesthetically, nor any sort of human expression in music. Well, that was the point, of course! It is somewhat ridiculous to find oneself in the audience watching a performance of this sort. It is equally ridiculous, I suggest, to sit in the audience listening to a piece of electronic music. Why is this? I think it is because a musical performance requires one or more human beings expressing something to other human beings. In other words, despite the bad press artistic intention has garnered in recent decades, it is in fact necessary to art that human beings intend to express something to other human beings. You might reply, that in the two pieces discussed above, the composer definitely had intentions. Well, ok, but they were not really expressive intentions, were they? In other words, while these might be justifiably considered experiments, they do not seem to have what I would term aesthetic content. Neither does Cage's 4'33 which I talk about here. Neither do any of Cage's pieces where the notes were chosen with chance procedures. The common element in all these pieces is the removal of any possibility of human aesthetic expression.

I think this was a phase that was mercifully brief. What surprises me is that people keep scheduling 'performances' of this stuff. Like some jokes, they are amusing once, but not for a second time. Ironically, since these pieces are emphatically not about expressing something aesthetic, what they really do is express an ideology. I say "ironically" because of Ligeti's comment. They all want to 'free' music from the human element. If you don't want to hear human expression in sound, you can go down to the freeway and listen to traffic sounds, or listen to the wind in the trees, or the surf crashing on a beach. One electronic piece I have heard was called Hurricanes and that was what it sounded like. Ok, but IT'S NOT INTERESTING!! Sorry to shout, but without intentional human expression, art has no more significance than a sunset. So what was the significance of this phase? Was it a sort of throat-clearing as a preface to post-modernism? There are some clues in this interesting essay on the phenomenon of post-modernism. After tracing the history of post-modernism and discussing some exemplary works the author points out that the strength of post-modernism was to remove the idea of a central narrative with accompanying aesthetic values. Edward Docx describes what happened next:

because postmodernism attacks everything, a mood of confusion and uncertainty began to grow and flourish until, in recent years, it became ubiquitous. A lack of confidence in the tenets, skills and aesthetics of literature permeated the culture and few felt secure or able or skilled enough or politically permitted to distinguish or recognise the schlock from the not. And so, sure enough, in the absence of any aesthetic criteria, it became more and more useful to assess the value of works according to the profits they yielded. Capital, as has been said many times before, accommodates all needs. So, paradoxically, we arrive at a moment where literature itself has become threatened, first by the artistic credo of postmodernism (the death of the author) and second by the unintended result of that credo, the hegemony of the marketplace. What then becomes sought and desired are fictions that resonate with the widest possible public: that is, with as many discourses as possible. This public can then give or withhold approval measured in sales.
In other words, increasingly, artistic success has become about nothing except money; and, increasingly, artists have come to judge their own success that way, too. This is the reason today that we feel the genre writer’s cry “I sold millions” so powerfully, even though in truth it can say little about the art form other than “it sold millions.” Changing disciplines, if we take this commoditisation of art to its natural limit, we arrive at Damien Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull, For the Love of God (2007). Commoditisation has here become the only point. The work, such as it is, centres on its cost and value and comprises also (I would say mainly) the media storm surrounding it: the rumours that it was bought for £50m, or that Hirst himself bought it, or that he offset his tax bill by claiming diamonds as tax deductible artistic materials, or that he didn’t buy it at all, or that nobody has bought it… And so postmodernly on. The paradox being this: that by removing all criteria, we are left with nothing but the market. The opposite of what postmodernism originally intended.

The author concludes by seeing a new phase beginning in which authentic aesthetic values are returning. Well, yes, that's my impression as well. No-one writes pieces for 100 metronomes any more. If there was a point to it, there is no longer. As the author indicates, "Gradually we hear more and more affirmation for those who can render expertly, the sculptor who can sculpt, the ceramist, the jeweller, even the novelist who can actually write." And, presumably, the composer who can actually compose music. For actual instruments. Played by actual performers. Requiring training and skill. And human expression...

UPDATE: Something I should have brought out is how seriously we are meant to take these pieces. I think the Ligeti is obviously a satire: Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes? Really? The title itself is a satire and the image of an audience sitting in a hall listening to 100 metronomes run down is itself hilarious. The piece by Steve Reich is simply an experiment--he doesn't seem to have a sense of humor. John Cage however, does. I suspect that most of his music is actually meant to be funny, 4'33 not least of all. I can just see Cage sitting in his apartment wondering to himself, just how much absurdness can I get away with? A piece for 18 radios tuned in and out randomly? A piece for water sounds including a duck call? How about a piece that is just silence!!! Heh. Never forget to entertain the possibility that the composer is just out to make fun of us.

Read more »