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A guide to Gyrgy Ligeti's music

A composer who refused to play by the rules and whose work has infiltrated popular
consciousness Ligeti's music is both richer and darker than what Stanley Kubrick heard in it
Tom Service
Monday 27 August 2012 13.11BST

It's where we're all headed, of course, but not all composers make you aware of the fact.
I'm talking not just about our inevitable demises, and the end of things as we know
them, but something even bigger: the heat-death of the universe. That's how Thomas
Ads describes the essential quality that he hears in Gyrgy Ligeti's music, in every piece
the Hungarian composer wrote, from his earliest works before he fled to the west under
cover of sackcloth in a train during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, to the very last
music he wrote in the years before his death in Vienna in 2006.
That creative journey encompasses some of the richest music of the 20th century, and
reveals an imaginative world of dizzying variety and expressive power. It's no surprise
that of the entire post-war generation who were at the forefront of the avant garde in the
1950s and 60s, it's Ligeti who is played the most. And here are just three reasons why:
listen to the Kyrie of the Requiem for one of the darkest visions of musical terror ever
imagined, then revel in the rhythmic glitter and complexity of a piece like the first Piano
Etude, and relish the warped harmonic world of the Horn Trio, like looking at Brahms or
Schumann through a distorting mirror.
But before we get to the potentially infinite visions of his music and what I think Ads
means by that "heat-death" idea, Ligeti is the 20th century composer with the most
cosmic connotations in popular consciousness. That's thanks to the way Stanley Kubrick
used Richard Steinitz, in his biography, relates how Ligeti's music was initially used
without permission) Ligeti's music in his movies starting with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In 2001, and in The Shining, too, Ligeti's music (along with Penderecki's and Bartk's) is
the sound of the other, the alien, the supernatural: passages from the Requiem
dramatise the images of 2001's monolith music of teeming, horrifying vastness and
unearthly intensity - and Ligeti and the other modernists become the sounds of Jack
Nicholson's psychological dissemblage in The Shining.
But the real otherness, the real distinctiveness of Ligeti's music is much richer than what
Kubrick heard in it. From the start of his life in the west, Ligeti was a permanently
provocative thorn in the side of any of the received wisdoms and ideologies of the avant
garde. Performances of his orchestral pieces from the late 50 and early 60s, Apparitions
and Atmosphres (which the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle play at the Proms on
30 August) were a revelation of a new way of structuring music, of thinking about the
possibilities for musical language. Instead of accepting at face value the diktats of the
contemporary serialism, or any other of the isms of the 50s, Ligeti's idea was to make
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texture as much of a driving force in musical architecture as pitch or rhythm, developing

what he called a "micro-polyphony" of incredibly dense pile-ups of musical lines so that
you're more aware of an ever-changing amorphous cloud of sound than the movement
of individual instruments or voices. Sounds complicated? It is to conceive and to
compose, but not to listen to: these uncanny textures smother, ooze, and slide into your
ears in those orchestral pieces, or the Requiem, or Lux Aeterna for 16 voices.
Ligeti was not thinking of this music in a vacuum, or pretending that he could provide
the definitive answer to the challenges of finding a post-war musical idiom. He never
trod any musical or political party line: not least because he had devastating personal
experience of where that kind of thinking could lead. As Hungarian Jews, his brother and
father were killed in concentration camps, but his mother survived Auschwitz; after the
war, he saw the brutality and intolerance of communism at first hand. The last thing he
wanted to become as a creative artist was a musical ideologue or despot. I met him when
he was already ill in 2003, and he told me that he was against the idea of "plannification"
in music; saying how he could never make a pre-planned musical form as Stockhausen
did, for example, in his Licht cycle. Ligeti also said to me, "I am extremely far away from
messianic thinking."
Ligeti's principled resistance of system-for-system's sake whether Boulez's version of
serialism, Cage's chance, or Xenakis's stochasticism meant that he had to find new
forms, new kinds of expression, in virtually every new piece he wrote. His searches and
his influences spread far beyond the conventional confines of western culture: the music
of the Aka pygmies was one of the catalysts that unlocked the last couple of decades of
his creativity, above all the rhythmic invention of the Piano Concerto and the Piano
Etudes; he was impressed by the sounds and processes of American minimalism in a way
that no other avant garde composer in Europe was; and his mind was open to the
furthest reaches of contemporary mathematics. He became fascinated by the new ideas
of chaos theory that Heinz-Otto Peitgen developed in the 1980s, and he extrapolated
some of those ideas into music such as the 4th movement of the Piano Concerto, a
chaotic ride to the abyss of continually disrupting, self-annihilating rhythmic patterns.
There are, however, constants in Ligeti's musical imagination. One of the most
important is the idea of the absurd. Ligeti's world of imagination was simultaneously an
asylum, a place of refuge, and a place to process the horror of the 20th century's great
geo-political nightmares through which he lived. As a child, he invented a self-sufficient
world of his creation that he called Kylwiria; as an adult, he was a lover of Lewis Carroll
(he wanted to write an opera based on Alice in Wonderland) and the surreal linguistic
games and imagery of Hungarian poet Sndor Weres. One of his very last pieces was
Sppal, dobbal, ndihegedvel, "With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles", a setting of Weres's
poems for percussion quartet and mezzo-soprano. They are, typically for Ligeti, on a tiny
scale, and they make sounds like nothing else: each of the seven songs is simultaneously
redolent of folk music and of modernist complexity, of childish immediacy and
decidedly adult sophistication. Yet this music is absolutely, definitively new, and each
number conjures its own little-but-large world of absurdist expression and resonance.
They are also, I think, strangely melancholic. The Sippal songs have that quality that all
the best absurdist poetry does of making you confront big ideas through lightness of
touch, humour, and sleight of hand.
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Ligeti's pieces are often short, even miniature, but it's as if that smallness of scale makes
you aware of some gigantic vacuum around them. The first Piano Etude writes out a
nihilistically destructive game of rhythmic abandon, and it does it all in a couple of
minutes; there are moments in the Violin Concerto in which you don't know whether to
laugh or cry at the sounds of the swanee whistles and ocarinas you're hearing in the
orchestra; the whole of his opera Le Grand Macabre is both a witty satire on death and a
chilling apocalyptic vision. In other words, you hear a reflection of the horrors that Ligeti
knew and saw during his lifetime, and you hear also his coming to terms with art's
essential futility in the face of all that tragedy. And yet, in the attempt to reflect on or
escape from those experiences, Ligeti's music is a clarion-call for the fundamental
importance of that supposedly futile artistic effort. It's music that gives you a glimpse of
the heat-death of the universe and the necessity to keep going, to keep composing, to
keep living in the face of that nihilistic fate that awaits us, even if it all, in the end,
amounts to nothing. It doesn't, of course but it's that existential tension that gives
Ligeti's music its humanity, and it's one reason his work, I think, will only become more
and more central to every performer's repertoire and every music-lover's ears.

Five key links

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Musica Ricercata
Requiem
Piano Concerto
Horn Trio
Sppal, dobbal, ndihegedvel

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