There may be no composer whose works wrench with nostalgia and tragedy; the grotesque and the surreal, as much as György Ligeti. A marred projection of the childhood of a young Hungarian-Jewish boy growing up through the two apex dictatorships of the twentieth Century, Stalin and Hitler. Predictably, this formed the basis of what was an early trauma, he notes’ I am permanently scarred; I will be overcome by revenge fantasies to the end of my days.’

Born in 1923, Transylvania, he survived World War II after losing his father and brother in a labour camp in Auschwitz. This sense of loss permeated throughout his works from Apparitions to Atmosphéres, and by the late 60’s he was spearheading an international community of avant-garde artists. He became a beacon for the post-war expressionism and avant-gardism of the 60’s & 70’s. Albeit a blight on the ideologies of avant-gardism due to his incessance on musical language and reframing structure.

Ligeti’s music has a cosmic quality to it. He gained fame in pop-culture with the use of Atmosphéres in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lontano in The Shining. However, Ligeti was influenced by many personal interests, mostly out-with the musical ideology but all relevant to Ligeti’s distinguished style. He was curios and explored topology, fractal geometry, chaos theory and the illusions of M.C. Esher, extrapolating these ideas and turning them into musical devices.

Despite this relation to intensity, Ligeti had a sense of humour which followed him and was reflected in his works. From ‘Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures’ to ‘Poéme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes’. Much like Stravinsky with his approach to rhythm, Ligeti wanted to push textural elements to be of equal importance as pitch and rhythm.

He avoided the serialism of his peers like Stockhausen and Boulez in favour of exploring more high-density textures and Eastern European Folk, seen more in works from Xenakis, Penderecki and Bartok, but reminiscent and clearly influenced in Ligeti’s work. Stylistically, he exploited sound, shielding the fragments of internal melody with a wall of thick audio-texture.

His music connotes the dark vastness of the universe, a growling intensity veiled with atonalism. It reflects the supernatural, harnessing an otherworldly quality. Ligeti dubbed it ’micro-polyphony’, which was a way of describing the techniques used in culminating, often dissonant and non-tonal textures to form melodic elements.

This mesh of sound formed a sort of web of minute, weaved musical lines. Ligeti’s style was to continue to sprout from his major work of the 1970’s, Le Grande Macabre, a satirical take on death and simultaneously, a terrifying apocalyptic vision. Along with this, his contribution to piano études, are considered some of the finest ever written.

He released a series of three books of piano Études that are considered the last of the famous trio of written études, following Chopin and Debussy, where Ligeti was the final addition. Some consider these études the finest piano music in recent history and the finest of the twentieth century.

Ligeti admired and was influenced by the fluidity of phrasing and tonality in the études of Debussy. Many of Debussy’s études began with a simple core idea, then would employ natural movement, flowing more organically. Like crashing waves creating beauty through interference, Ligeti created a thick textural weaving, circling the core idea.

Ligeti’s works imbue the horrors of the most debauched parts of the twentieth century, while acting as a testament to the perseverance required to make great art and the ultimate futility in the face of human tragedy. It’s this nihilism, that when heard in Ligeti’s world, encourages the listener to seek not the light at the end of the tunnel (as there is none) but the light that is coming from all around us and that is found at the centre of all things.

György Ligeti: Exploring the Otherness

SD