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György Ligeti: Ricercare - Omaggio a Frescobaldi (1951)

From the album György Ligeti Edition 6.  Keyboard Works

When you think of organ music, you probably think of the North German masters of the late Baroque, composers such as Bach and Buxtehude blasting radiant sound-beams of Protestant piety to rattle the stained glass and shake the souls of the faithful.

But in fact the pipe organ tradition goes back further, at least to the early 17th century, to intrepid, non-German composers with names like Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and Girolamo Frescobaldi.  The latter is the subject of this musical homage, an early work by Ligeti written before he left Hungary for the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Built around a dolorous theme that wends chromatically ever downward, Ligeti’s Ricercare is a tribute to the lugubrious glories of early Baroque counterpoint. (And if you don’t think 17th-century music could be so wonderfully dissonant, listen to Sweelinck’s Fantasia Chromatica.)

This one begins very quietly, but builds to a powerful din.  Don’t blow out your speakers.

January 22, 2010, 5:35pm

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Györgi Ligeti: Continuum (1968)

From the album Continuum / Zehn Stücke für Bläserquintett / Artikulation / Glissandi / Etüden für Orgel / Volumina

The Hungarian composer Györgi Ligeti (1923-2006), who spent most of his career in Germany and Austria, is widely regarded as one of the most imaginative musical minds of the second half of the 20th century.  He wrote pioneering works in many different media, including electronics, traditional “concert” instruments, and mechanical music.

Ligeti is probably best known for his compositional experiments undertaken in the 1960s, starting with the orchestral work Atmosphères (1961).  In this piece, each of the 55 string instruments plays its own melodic line, creating a dense web of sound in which the identity of the individual parts is lost.  Instead of distinct melodies one hears slowly shifting planes of sound, a glacial condensation and rarefaction of timbral space.  It is an utterly new kind of musical organization, which was also discovered independently around the same time by composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Friedrich Cerha.

Interestingly, Ligeti and other composers have stated that their experiments with orchestral sound production in the 1960s were inspired in part by the new spectrum of electronic sound that was “in the air” at the time. This is ironic in that much of the history of electronic music has been occupied with efforts to artificially reproduce the sound of traditional instruments.  Here, the tables were turned.

Ligeti described Continuum as an attempt to create a kind of “continuous sound” as he had in Atmosphères, but now using the limited sonic resources of the harpsichord.  Here Ligeti was to explore the threshold between an extremely fast succession of sound events and the perception of a continuous sound— hence the title of the piece.  The principle is the same one that allows us to perceive a mechanically generated succession of 24 images per second as the “moving pictures” of cinema. Continuum is at once a performative tour de force, a highly compressed vehicle of musical expression, and an exploration of the limits of hearing.

September 19, 2009, 12:54pm