Christmas Eve 1957-according to a telegram I still have, at 11.02 p.m.-Paris-Gare du Nord. Ligeti arrives in Paris for the first time in his life. I wait at the station. The pianist György Szoltsanyi, my friend and our host that evening, finds it strange that someone would want to travel so late on Christmas Eve. He invites Ligeti as well to his home at 48 Boulevard Garibaldi.
"The metro is still running," I say. "No, let's walk!"
And without hesitating Ligeti leads me through the streets of Paris, I who have lived here for over six months-naming every intersection and the streets beyond.
(back corner, top, left): Ligeti's early childhood. His obsessive pastime: perusing maps and memorizing them by heart-among them the map of his dream city, Paris-while already working on his fictitious country, Kylwyria.
(front, top, right): The spirit of the Kylwyria construct seems to be hereditary-also in his early childhood, his son Lukas spent years writing the encyclopedia of his invented planet, with examples from its scientific history, literature, fine arts, and music.
If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd agree with me.
I've said it many times before (at a party last night for instance, fascinating company me) but now it's official.
There are exceptions that prove the rule of course (prove as in test obviously, prove as in confirm would be a bit mental) but generally speaking non-tonal music is like a cup of espresso coffee, or a shot of whisky (single malt naturally) or perhaps most cogently, a poem.
Music which has no pulse, no 'tune' and lacks a tonal centre ought to be fairly brief; unless you can find other means of parsing the material into graspable sections or moments (as Sciarrino does with silence/space or Kurtág via many short movements to cite two examples).
To break this 'rule' or to compose in ignorance of it is to run the risk of writing music which approaches a sort of entropy; so much information that the listener can't process it, can't remember it or walk away feeling like they have a clear idea of the piece. Boredom would be a more prosaic description.
More is certainly less in most cases, many a beautiful chord or flowing contrapuntal section has been ruined by suffocation.
If you're going to write a long non-tonal piece (let's say 10+ minutes) justify it, musically (not with some guff in the programme notes or commentary).
It's not often that the graphic design of a score is this good (in my experience and as per my tastes.)
Kurtag'sOmagio A Luigi Nono doesn't just have a pretty cover, have a look at the third movement, a beautiful, elegant page of music, and it sounds like it looks (unsurprisingly, perhaps, have a look at the YouTube clip of the piece at the bottom of the post).
I intend to look more closely at the harmony at some point but I am currently a bit too busy with other stuff so it will have to wait. The piece can be found on thisCD (first link UK shop, second US, the first CD 'in stock', so far.) The score is currently out of print unfortunately (so I am told by Boosey and Hawkes although they are still listing it for some reason)
(click on the images to enlarge them, as per usual.)
UPDATE: Hungarian composer Adam Kondor informs me that Kurtág scores can be ordered direct from the publisher, Editio Musica Budapest. Thanks to Adam for the information and links.
Also if you search on their site you can have a look at sample pages of the scores and listen to extracts of pieces, nice feature/s.
Unfortunately, EMB have changed the design of their scores, now Omagio has a somewhat muted black shiny jacket, see. (looks a bit like a restaurant wine list.)
I forgot about these concerts after they got a bit of press here and there last year. Worth a look if you like any of these composers, the videos stream easily and are of a decent image/sound quality.
Here is a list of the concerts, composers and performers...
Webcast 1 Larry Goves - Four Letter Words György Kurtág - Signs, Games and Messages György Kurtág - Scenes from a Novel ° György Ligeti - Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures
Webcast 2 Claude Vivier - Et je reverrai cette ville etrange (ensemble, 1981) Claude Vivier - Shiraz (piano, 1977) Claude Vivier - Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele? (voices / ensemble 1983) Claude Vivier - Journal* (voices / percussion, 1977)
View the 3D film by Dave Dunbar which accompanied Gordon McPherson's work Celeste Unborn. The music was recorded live at the performance on 8th March 2008. In order to appreciate the 3D film you will need a pair of 3D glasses which have one Red lens and one Cyan.
Firstly I think this is a great piece, my 'favourite' wind quintet, as with most Ligeti I have heard (nearly all of it, I think) the music is paced just right, the overall duration of the work and its various movements are all digestible (to my ears) and even though it's a fairly 'complex' affair (at times) on first listen you walk away with an idea of the music still ringing in your ears, so to speak.
Also I think the scoring is quite practical, the ideas, however complicated, are expressed with clarity (I am not suggesting these qualities are positive musical 'universals', just my own preferences/predjudices, take them or leave them).
The element I want to look at today (listen up at the back please) is the way the music accelerates and decelerates in a precise way by means of various tuplets/groups as opposed to the more commonplace accelerando or rallentando/ritardando technique.
This acceleration and deceleration is some extent an illusion, it might be better to describe the effect as one of increasing and decreasing density. Why?, because the tempo or pulse is constant, it's the number of attacks per beat that changes. A good analogy, perhaps, are gears.
Think of a bicycle (go on, in your favourite colour), imagine that each revolution of the pedals is one beat, this stays the same, what changes is the gear on the rear wheel. For each turn of the pedals the number of revolutions of the rear wheel differs, increasing or decreasing in number (3 per turn/beat, then 4 then 5, then 7 or going in the other direction to slow down or reduce the density of notes).
Starting with the eighth bar/measure you can see/hear the flute and clarinet moving into some tuplet patterns (after some fairly slow moving polyphony), first a quintuplet and then a sextuplet (for the clarinet) then both instruments play a septuplet in unison before playing a series of straight demisemiquavers/32nd notes. This results in a 'winding up' effect, or a change of gear.
Then the clarinet holds a steady trill pattern while the remaining instruments (except the horn) play a (rather spiffing) melody over the top (in bars/measures 10-13 ish). The flute joins the trill fest with the clarinet and finally, they both decelerate or 'wind down' or 'change gear' using the same technique, first straight hemidemisemiquavers/64th notes then into a diminishing pattern, septuplet, sextuplet, quintuplet and a straight four in hemidemisemiquavers/64th notes, then down into various groups of semiquavers/16ths, then quavers/8ths then a semibreve/whole note with a fermata to end.
This technique is broadly speaking 'micropolyphonic' (one of Ligeti's inventions more or less).
Why is this worth discussing you might ask?, good question..
A more standard accelerando or rall/rit sound wouldn't sound the same at all, it would be much smoother, and arguably, considerably less interesting. The effect Ligeti achieves is something like the sound of a slightly clunky mechanism winding or gearing up and down and he achieves this via fairly simple instructions (even I can read/intepret it so it can't be that complex now can it).
It's almost an illusory effect, the tempo or speed (in one sense) remaining the same while the density of attacks changes. Whether in some ontological sense this results in a speeding up or down is something of a semantic issue (an interesting result for a piece of music perhaps).
This seems a common feature of his music in this period (ive not looked at his later music properly yet, i.e. from late 70s onwards so I can't comment on it).
In terms of the voice leading and harmony, briefly, as you can see the motion between the clarinet and flute is contrary in the decelarating/winding down section (bars/measures 14-15) and mostly contrary in the previous accelerating gesture though the relationship between the two voices is more complicated or less ordered (from a cursory examination anyway). This more- or-less-the-same-but-slightly-different effect is another 'micropolyphonic' gesture/trademark.
The harmony (referring to the flute and clarinet) is generally speaking chromatic and voices move by step, it's clear in the decelarating section that both instruments are playing a repeated semitone gesture/trill in contrary motion on the same two pitches (Bb/10 and A/9) , with the clarinet moving up to B/11 at the end and the flute finishes on A/9 (making this final gesture symmetrical, a tone or major 2nd leaving an axis tone in the middle, a Bb/10, this axis is implied not sounded, perhaps a 'pensanto' if you like, a note 'imagined, not played' - Perle - or perhaps, it's just a major 2nd).
So there you have it, apologies for the brevity of this 'analysis' and if I have made any mistakes (i'll check it again over the next few days). I only analyse pieces like this for my own compositional purposes, not because I intend to be any sort of theorist or analyst so this is something of a cursory, idiosyncratic reading of the piece, better than nothing though eh?.
The score is available here and is published by Schott, the music fragment in the video is from this CD by the Albert Schweitzer Quintet (also featuring a rather good quintet by Kurtág amongst other Hungarian quintet music including one of Ligeti's and Kurtág's teachers, Sándor Veress).
(UPDATED: 08/02/2009 to include the 'gears' analogy)
(UPDATED 15/03/09, sorted out pitches in final harmonic 'analysis' bit)
The score fragments below are marked Lento (crotchet/quarter note = 40). Also, something that caught me out, it's a transposing/conductors score not a usual concert pitch study score (*grumbles.)
'How can I put it?, I have neither a vocation nor a mission, just a reason, something that I enjoy getting out of bed for in the morning. So that my life is now independent of the things that happen to me'
Posts
