Here's a good Ligeti Obituary. It's by Evan Dickerson, whose writing
is always thoughtful and original.
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2006/Jun06/ligeti_obit.htm
Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006): an obituary
With the passing of Gyorgy Ligeti on 12 June 2006 at the age of
83 in Vienna following a lengthy illness, the musical world has
lost a true maverick. An independent thinker, Ligeti charted a
singular route in his music with the evolution of a voice that
is hard to ignore. In this respect one is tempted to put him
alongside figures such as Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen and Xenakis
when considering the major shapers of late twentieth century
composition.
Ligeti was born in Romanian Transylvania in 1923 to Hungarian
parents. Musical studies began in 1941 with his attending Cluj
conservatoire in Romania, which led to further study at the Franz
Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he was later appointed Professor.
Following his arrest in 1943, as a result of being Jewish, Ligeti
was sentenced to forced labour for the remainder of World War
Two. Survival, however, was not without its cost: the war claimed
his brother and father amongst other members of his family.
The end of the war might have brought physical release but
musically he continued to be heavily constrained by the Stalinist
censorship in Hungary. For this reason much of his early work
draws heavily on the use of Hungarian and Romanian folksong,
reflecting the influence of Bartok and Kodaly. 'I am an enemy
of ideologies in the arts. Totalitarian regimes do not like
dissonances', he commented ruefully.
The Concerto Romanes,c (1951) is composed on the very limit of
Stalinist dictates. One can pick up the folk music influences:
Kodaly in the dour Andantino, Bartok in the scherzo and distant
shades of Enescu in the breathless finale. After the 1956 Hungarian
revolution Ligeti fled to Vienna, and to his first real contact
with avant-garde composers of the day, becoming an Austrian
citizen in 1967. The orchestral work Apparitions established his
reputation and secured the important endorsement of Stockhausen
amongst others. From that point on Ligeti rarely, if ever, looked
back as a creative force. Works such as Atmospheres and Volumina
expounded a personal alternative to the serialism of Webern and
his followers. However, if there was a single concern that
dominated his music it was change. No other contemporary composer's
work is filled with so many turning points. Some view these
changes as organic growth, taking its cue from his research into
chaos theory, fractal geometry and biochemistry.
The 1960s saw his music consumed by the use of super-dense
polyphony he called "micropolyphony". Poeme symphonique, written
for 100 metronomes which run down at different speeds, is but a
single example of this, and in extreme. Parallels of a kind were
found in his use of speech sounds and nonsense syllables, which
- perhaps unwittingly - can bring to mind the Dadaist conception
of language- music-construction found in Kurt Schwitters' Ursonata.
At the core of his artistic personality is the quality of fun,
and that in no small measure has helped to make works accessible
to a wide public. Extracts from Lux aeterna, Atmospheres and
Requiem found their way into the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's
film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick was not one to choose his
music lightly, noting that Ligeti's work had 'an extremely urgent
visuality' about it.
As if to consciously exploit populist appeal (though I am sure
he would not have agreed with this view) his works of the 1970s
moved back to a whole-hearted use of tonality. By way of
justification he stated unapologetically, ' I no longer listen
to rules on what is to be regarded as modern and what as
old-fashioned.' This ran in parallel with several important
explorations of the concerto territory. Musical 'forms with
history', including the etude (his proved to be the most important
recent contributions to the genre) were now back on the agenda.
The Piano Concerto blends more than other works elements of
polyphony and folk music. The Hamburg Concerto, a horn concerto
in all but name, sets the soloist against instrumental groupings
including four natural horns to make possible the exploitation
of overtones. The Violin Concerto recalls with more than a little
nostalgia his roots and the style of folk fiddling with intentionally
varied tuning of the solo instrument, to an unreservedly
polyrhythmical accompaniment. This reflects the growing influence
that African drumming was having upon his music in the 1990s.
Surrealist juxtaposition and the theatre of the absurd came to
bear in equal measure upon the inception of his stage work Le
Grand Macabre, an effortless mix of operetta and the darkest of
black humour: 'Stage action and music should be dangerous and
bizarre, absolutely exaggerated, absolutely crazy.' This, he
felt, was the most direct way he could reach an audience.
Among the many awards and prizes his work attracted a couple
stand out. The 2004Polar Music prize recognised his ability
to "stretch the boundaries of the musically conceivable from
mind-expanding sounds to new astounding processes, in a thoroughly
personal style that embodies both inquisitiveness and imagination
", as the judges put it. The same year also brought the ECHO
KLASSIK Award given by the Deutsch Phono-Akademie for Lifetime
Achievement.
There can be little doubt that Ligeti was fortunate in having
musicians with searching interpretive abilities perform his music
in recent years with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Isabelle Faust,
Charlotte Hellekant, Jonathan Nott, George Benjamin and the
Arditti Quartet amongst them. Without the determination of such
artists the Ligeti Edition on record might never have been
achieved. Requiring several labels that were willing to get
involved at various stages throughout the project, more than
once it seemed as if the end might never be reached. How close
Ligeti came to being a major victim of the recording industry's
collective implosion.
Ligeti is survived by his wife and a son, Lukas, a New York-based
percussionist.
* * *
Personal recollections: My first extended contact with Ligeti's
music came in 1989 with the 'Clocks and Clouds' Festival given
on London's South Bank by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the
committed baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen. To say that each concert
bemused me would be an understatement. What was valuable though
was the context of contrasts
Ligeti was set in: Debussy rang strongly at the time. Each
concert ended with a still sprightly Ligeti jumping onto the
platform with armfuls of sunflowers, which he then distributed
to the performers... meeting with some bemused looks in the
process! That 'Clocks and Clouds' helped announce some key works
in the Ligeti oeuvre to London
was important in itself. For me, it sparked an ongoing interest
in his music (not that I always get his point first on first
hearing, but that says far more about me than Ligeti).
Diary notes made following Pierre-Laurent Aimard's 2005 Wigmore
Hall recital that featured a selection of Ligeti's etudes record
that I found:
Across the Etudes many long shadows are cast, not least by
Chopin's and Debussy's compositions in the genre with the
techniques of Scarlatti and Schumann. Satie, Liszt, Nancarrow
or Hungarian and Balinese flavours (even the sculptures of
Constantin Brancus,i) infuse and form the basis of individual
studies.
Indeed, it was interesting for me to note how it took such a
refined pianist as Aimard to show that the =C9tudes could "grow
from simplicity
to great complexity, behaving like growing organisms [...]
displaying high virtuosity as a response to my own inadequate
piano technique", as Ligeti himself outlined they should.
And tradition? 'There is only one tradition. Our music either
stands up to it or not.' His certainly did.
Evan Dickerson
The complete Ligeti discography:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/music/muze/index.pl?site=3Dmusic&action=3Ddiscography&artist_id=3D830=324
Further reading:
Gyorgy Ligeti by Richard Toop (Pub: Phaidon Press, 1999) Based
on interviews with Ligeti, this book surveys his life and music.
Gyorgy Ligeti: Music of the Imagination by Richard Steinitz (Pub:
Northeastern University Press, 2003) A scholarly traversal of
Ligeti's compositions.
Anne
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