Ligeti
Atmosphères
György Ligeti was born in 1923 in the Transylvanian town of Dicsöszentmárton to a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family. In 1941 he entered the Cluj Conservatory to study music with teachers such as Ferenc Farkas and Zoltán Kodály. His education was interrupted in January, 1944, when he was sent to a labor camp; other members of his family were also sent to concentration or labor camps. His father and brother were both killed, but his mother survived the horrors of Auschwitz. Ligeti was released in 1945 and then studied at the Budapest Academy of Music, graduating in 1949. He taught at the academy from 1950 to 1956, but fled the Hungarian communist regime in 1956.
He was always interested in musical experimentation, and in Cologne he was able to work with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Electronic Music Studio in 1958. Ligeti did not write many electronic pieces of his own (Glissandi, 1957, and Artikulation, 1958, are two), but many of his instrumental works achieve some of the same effects. He developed a style based on clusters of chromatic chords, creating sonic textures that seem to grow and recede organically. He termed these overlapping timbres “micropolyphony.” Their effect creates a sense of drama and motion without the use of conventional rhythm or melody. He employed a similar technique for vocal music that requires singers to make cries and other vocalizations to convey emotion without words.
Some of his better-known compositions include his Requiem (1963 – 65), and the orchestral San Francisco Polyphony (1973 – 74), created while he was Composer in Residence at Stanford University. He also wrote a well-received opera, the farcical Le Grand Macabre (1975 – 77) which features an opening prelude on car horns. However, he has been perhaps most heard through music used by Stanley Kubrick in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). Both Atmosphères (1961) and Ligeti’s vocal work Lux Aeterna (1966) feature prominently. (Kubrick also used Ligeti’s music in his 1999 “Eyes Wide Shut”). Ligeti continued working until late into his life, passing away in 2006 at age 83. A memorial concert in Vienna concluded with an appropriately poignant performance of his Symphonic Poem for 100 Metronomes (1962), in which metronomes are set at different speeds and slowly wind down.
Ligeti expressed his musical philosophy as follows: “Throughout my life, I always found dogmas uninteresting. Pioneering undiscovered areas is what I consider my main challenge. Complex forms and structures built from extremely simple processes is the lesson we can draw from studying the structure of living organisms and of human and animal societies.”
Atmosphères was written for large orchestra minus percussion, and explores the gamut of sonic textures available from this body, without the use of any electronics. It begins with a soft chord that uses each instrument in the orchestra to simultaneously sound every single note in a five-octave span. Different sections of the orchestra drop out and the chords swell and fade in waves of sound that seem to sweep over the audience. Shivering, vibrating strings evolve to a crescendo of woodwinds sounding their highest notes, piccolos piercing the top of the register. Low instruments then grumble in contrast. Brass players blow tunelessly through their horns, string players stroke the strings of their instruments, and two players almost inaudibly vibrate the strings of the piano. Thus Ligeti ends his examination of the ‘living organism’ of the orchestra.