Free Stuff!!: Ligeti Documentary with English Subs, Plus Other Stuff Inc Audio Interview

Ligeti: A still from the documentary linked to here.

That's right, that documentary on Ligeti you might have come across, the only one ever made as far as I know which unfortunately never had English subtitles, well now it has, sort of, with a bit of jiggery-pokery.

Here is the English blurb and credits..

Runtime: 64mins
Language: French (no subtitles)

Réalisateur: Michel Follin
Auteurs: Judit Kele, Michel Follin, Arnaud de Mezamat
CoProduction: Abacaris Film, Artline Films, La Sept Arte, RTBF, Magyar
Televizio, Productions du Sablier, Centre Georges Pompidou

Grand Prix, Festival International du Film d’Art de Montréal (1994) Prix Sacem, Film de musique (1994)

The Hungarian composer György Ligeti's biography typifies the displaced cosmopolitan, truly at home only in the international community of music. Appropriately enough, this revealing film portrait of his life and music has a train journey as its central metaphor, with Ligeti gazing through the window onto the changing middle-European landscape. His music - innovative, complex, brilliantly eclectic - accompanies his reflections and memories.

I shall explain this jiggery-pokery, I found a 'DVD' copy of the documentary on a non-legit music site that cannot be named here (see Gerry in the legal department if you want an explanation, 5th floor.)

Someone posted a comment on the page with a link to a file containing some English subtitles he/she and his/her friend had put together (unfortunately the French speaking side of the partnership 'disappeared' at some point so apparently the last few minutes of the documentary have been translated with Google translate, you can still understand the text though.)

They are ok as far as I can tell (I don't speak French unfortunately), not brilliant but good considering it was a non-professional DIY job, some spelling and grammatical errors here and there etc.

Overall I found it watchable and informative anyway so thanks very much to those involved.

I shall get to the point then, you can download the video file legally and for free from the great UBUWEB site, link here.

This video file has no subtitles so for those you will need to go here (a Deposit Files link to the .SRT file I just uploaded there, it's only 43kb).

UPDATE: Alternative link to SRT file here.

The original .SRT file was made to match the much larger 'DVD' version on the site-that-cannot-be-named (I don't think there is a real DVD version, I couldn't find one anyway, it might just be a better quality copy, it's over 2gig.) I renamed it to match the UBUWEB version, happily, the two work together ok (the UBUWEB version is a more manageable 600+ meg.)

To get the subtitles to work simply place the .SRT file in the same folder as the video file, then make sure you have subtitles selected in your media player (I don't know if this will work with Macs BTW, try it, if not do some searching for how to use .SRT files)

And Bob's your uncle, you can now watch the documentary in English. If you speak French and think the translation is terrible and needs doing again, let me know, send me the text and timings and I'll make another version of it (I might cut it into pieces and put it on YouTube too.)

That's not all, when looking for a decent picture for this post I came across this site called Lichtensteiger, not sure what it's all about (home page says something about digital design) but on their servers somewhere is this page on Ligeti, featuring lots of tracks to stream and various links and quotes, including one back to the BBC's Radio3 site featuring the John Tusa interview with Ligeti (in English) which you can stream here (it covers quite a bit of the same material as the documentary.)

Ligeti, Free Stuff, Again (and some Xenakis).

Ligeti: 'What?, me?, again?!, great!!'

I just can't help it at the moment, it seems the great man keeps appearing all over the place. This week Ligeti is BBC Radio 3's composer of the week (my Dad who listens to Radio 3 said to me today 'your mate's on the radio this week').

For those of you unfamiliar with the format, it's a one hour long programme with music and discussion broadcast every weekday (here is the Radio 3 schedule), these programmes are then archived for a short time (7 days I think). I have no idea how it all works if you are outside of the UK (though I think you can access the programmes, not sure though, good luck).

Then, Ligeti's Violin Concerto is on Performance on 3 on Friday at 7pm, and, while i'm at it, there is an edition of Radio 3's excellent Discovering Music series about the Violin Concerto which you can listen to as part of their archive (also you'll find a link to an interview with John Tusa).

And, Xenakis's music is featured on Performance on 3 tomorrow at 7pm again...(an event connected to the one covered by Lizzie a couple of posts ago).

A concert given at the Barbican, London, featuring the music of Iannis Xenakis, described by Olivier Messiaen as 'a hero unlike any other'. Xenakis's very original music has many complex rhythmic patterns, polyphonic melodies and distinct instrumental and vocal textures and draws on his training as an architect and his work as assistant to Le Corbusier. In his piece Nuits, voices explore the phonetic sounds of Sumerian and ancient Persian.

Christian Lindberg (trombone)
Rolf Hind (piano)
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)
Stephen Betteridge (conductor)

Xenakis: Tracees; Anastenaria; Sea-Nymphs; Mists; Nuits; Troorkh; Antikhthon

Free Stuff!!!: Ligeti In Conversation PDF

Ligeti, none too pleased about having to pose with (100) metronomes (to add insult to injury it looks like he was asked to sign a print of the photo at a later date)

Here it is, a PDF of a conversation with Ligeti which is an extract from the now out of print In Conversation: Gyorgy Ligeti in Conversation with Peter Varnai, Joseph Hausler, Claude Samuel and Himself (1983.)

I found it ages ago via Google or Scribd I think and just found it now while going through the archives, it's hosted on Joseph Klein's region of the University of North Texas site. Some thanks due to him then.

UPDATE: as far as I can tell, Klein seems to have taken that PDF down (can't find it now anyway, thanks to keralitee for letting me know via a comment). Here is an alternative link I found (on Deposit Files).

UPDATE 2: Thanks to a comment from Lizzie it seems the link from the University of North Texas still works, I must have messed up the original link somehow (cough) and then failed to find it again on Google (and one PDF search engine I use has stopped working today for some reason). I've updated the original link now and i'll leave the Deposit Files one up too just in case. Thanks keralitee and Lizzie.

(the book the extract comes from seems to be out of print, if you own the copyright or the book is going back into print and think the extract should be removed, let me know)

Another Quote For The Beginning of March

Ligeti: 'now, what did I come in here for?'

Although complex polyrhythms have existed in Ligeti’s music ever since he came to the West—practically every score abounds in simultaneous layers of quintuplets, septuplets, etc.—the difference between the earlier pieces and the recent music lies in this new conception of pulse.

In the earlier works, the pulse is something to be divided into two, three and so on; even thirteenth-tuplets occasionally appear. The effect of these different subdivisions, especially when they occur simultaneously, is to blur the aural landscape, creating the micropolyphonic effect of Ligeti’s music from the sixties. The smallest common denominator of all these subdivisions is a microscopic fraction of a beat; no one can hear it, much less count it.

On the other hand, the recent music (and a few earlier pieces such as Continuum, 1966) conceives of the pulse as a musical atom, a common denominator, a basic unit which cannot be divided any further. Different rhythms appear through multiplications of the basic pulse, rather than divisions: this is the principle of African music seized on by Ligeti.

It also appears in the music of Philip Glass, Steve Reich and others; and significantly it shares much in common with the additive rhythms of Balkan folk music, the music of Ligeti’s youth. In effect, the blurred rhythmic patterns are now seen through a microscope; instead of a dense web, the shape’s contours become clearer, though fantastically complex, like an image of a fractal coastline.

“In a piece such as Continuum where I (consciously) tried to create an illusionary rhythm, I came (unconsciously) close to the rhythmic conception evident in the music of sub-
Saharan Africa” (Ligeti 1988b:6).

Ligeti, Africa and Polyrhythm:// Stephen Andrew Taylor

Quote For About Two Thirds Of The Way Through February

Mauricio Kagel

Anagrama was a spectacular success when first performed at the ISCM Festival in Cologne on 11 June 1960, but since then passed into near-oblivion. To have it performed at all, Kagel had to lobby for a change in the ISCM's rules as pieces had to be proposed by the national organisations, and Kagel was considered 'stateless'. (In ensuring that individual composers could propose pieces, Kagel also made possible the inclusion of of Ligeti's Apparitions at the same festival; Toop 1999: 72; Steinitz 2003: 98.)

Anagrama was performed at the same concert as Stockhausen's Kontakte, and led to tensions between the two composers that according to Ligeti, disunited the whole European avant-garde. What happened was that at a post-concert reception at the home of the owner of the DuMont publishing house, Ernst Brücher, everybody was only talking about Anagrama, and nobody about Kontakte, which the touchy Stockhausen appears to have taken personally - even though Kagel was one of the few who did talk to him about his piece (Kurtz 1992: 203f.; Toop 1999: 72). The reversal of fortunes, whereby Kontakte is now almost universally hailed as one of the foremost masterpieces of the time, whereas Anagrama is all but forgotten, remains to be explained.

The Music of Mauricio Kagel; Björn Heile (pg21)

UPDATE: You can get a free recording of Anagrama plus other Kagel pieces from the Avant Garde Project archive, volumes 40 and 41. (Anagrama is in AGP40).

Free Stuff!: Streaming Lancaster Uni/Psappha/BBC Singers Concerts

Psappha, from this Guardian Article about them and Claude Vivier.

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

Psappha
Nicholas Kok: conductor
Maria Husmann: soprano
Jane Manning: soprano
Jessica Walker: mezzo-soprano
Dean Robinson: baritone

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)

BBC Singers
Psappha
Nicholas Kok: conductor
Carolyn Foulkes: soprano
Sian Menna: mezzo-soprano
Stephen Jeffes: tenor
Edward Price: bass

Webcast 3
Gordon McPherson - Celeste Unborne
Steven Mackey - Five Animated Shorts
Edward Cowie - Psappha Portraits world premiere

Psappha
Nicholas Kok: conductor

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.

Ligeti: Ten Pieces For Wind Quintet 'Analysis'.

Following up on my previous Berio 'analysis' here is something from Ligeti (Ten Pieces For Wind Quintet 1968), this time looking at rhythm, voice leading and gesture as opposed to harmony as before.

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).



For more info (from a competent theorist) on the voice leading and pitch relationhips see 'Stepwise Continuity As A Structural Determinant in Gyorgy Ligeti's Ten Pieces For Wind Quintet' by Charles D. Morrison in Perspectives of New Music (which I haven't read for ages and probably should have done before posting this, I might read it over the next day or two in case it contradicts anything I have written here).

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.)

pgs 13 & 14 (click for larger images).

A Quotation For Early February

In playing 'Melodien', however, all concerned must realise that the basic beat covers a diversity of metre; when he plays soloistic melodies or ornaments each instrumentalist must give a more or less independent, 'elastic' interpretation to his line; it must have an individual inner vitality and a dynamic and agogic shape of its own, which runs contrary to the barring and the beat.

In short, each part must 'breathe' individually. Exceptions, played without rubato: a) when two or more instruments are rhythmically coupled in unison, in octaves or in other intervals: b) subordinate passages such as pedal points and ostinato patterns. Entrances of the parts must occur precisely: only afterwards does the slight rubato take effect.

From the notes of Melodien by György Ligeti (1971).

Quote of the Month (3) 12/2008

Page from Stockhausen's Studie II

'The generation of rhythmic material was only one side of the problem: its notation also proved a challenge. The more complex it became, the less exact the result in actual performance, so that Stockhausen was able to describe notation as dependent on "uncertainty factors" occuring within fields whose size was relative to the complexity.' 26

26. This, as Ligeti noted, had been a problem since the early twentieth century: see dRV (D), 38-40.

Source: Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics pg139 (M.J. Grant).

Radio 3 Composer Interviews

Part of John Tusa`s series...

Gyorgy Ligeti...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/ligeti_transcript.shtml

Louis Andriessen

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/andriessen_transcript.shtml

Harrison Birtwistle

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/birtwistle_transcript.shtml

Elliot Carter

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/carter_transcript.shtml

Also transcribed in his book 'On Creativity'