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Henryk Górecki: Concerto pour clavecin et cordes, op. 40 (excerpt; 1980)

From the album Rhythm Plus (1990)

Here’s a piece of “power minimalism” from Polish composer Henryk Górecki, an interesting figure best known for his hugely successful Symphony No. 3 (1977), a mournful but relatively accessible composition that was re-released in 1992 and became a surprise hit, selling over a million copies. This piece was by no means representative of Górecki’s music, however, and his larger body of work remained heterogeneous and largely unknown.

The Concerto pour clavecin et cordes (Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings) is based on pulsating harpsichord figures and underlying string tones, both outlining a stark minor scale. The effect is overpowering, though unavoidably cinematic in association (thank you, Phillipp Glass). In its rough, punchy texture, this piece recalls the minimalist music of the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, and perhaps points toward a distinctive European spin on what is generally regarded as an American phenomenon.

Górecki’s piece, like most of the others on this disc, was written for Elisabeth Chojnacka, a brilliant Polish harpsichordist who through her virtuosic playing and advocacy for new music has positioned herself as a veritable court musician of the European avant-garde. In addition to Górecki, composers such as Xenakis, Ligeti, Halffter, Ohana, Donatoni, and Bussotti have written pieces dedicated to her.

March 30, 2011, 12:03pm

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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