This dissertation investigates the relationship between György Ligeti’s soundmass
works and the musical past. After his emigration in 1956, Ligeti (1923-2006)
gained renown for his sound-mass style, exemplified in works such as Apparitions (1958-
59), Atmosphères (1961), Requiem (1963-65) and Lontano (1967). These works
minimize the perceptual salience of melody, rhythm and harmony, instead foregrounding
orchestral clusters and thus suggesting that timbre is the central compositional issue.
Despite his immersion in the creative atmosphere of the Darmstadt circle, Ligeti’s soundmass
works diverged from the serial, pointillist style that preoccupied the European
avant-garde at the time. However, I argue that Ligeti’s distance from the Darmstadt
avant-garde is only apparent. In fact, this milieu served as his primary socio-cultural
reference point after his emigration.
The concept of “historical memory,” following from the work of French
sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945), suggests that Ligeti’s understanding of the
musical past was deeply shaped by the collective interpretations in circulation amongst
the Darmstadt avant-garde circle. Analysis of Ligeti’s sketches, writings and scores
shows that he recollected historical influences that were important in the discourses of his
milieu and redeployed them in his sound-mass works. For example, Ligeti’s Apparitions shows traces of the analyses of Debussy’s Jeux that were produced by Herbert Eimert and
Karlheinz Stockhausen. Atmosphères, though it is an acoustic work, reflects the
collective representation of electronic music that had developed at the Westdeutscher
Rundfunk studio in Cologne. The Darmstadt composers’ sustained interest in the concept
of Klangfarbenmelodie, as practiced by both Schoenberg and Webern, informs Ligeti’s
use of timbre in Lontano and the Cello Concerto. Finally, Ligeti capitalizes upon the
popularity of Webern around Darmstadt, using Webern’s music as an opportunity to
recast Bartók’s achievements to his new Western European colleagues in the Requiem.
Ligeti’s renegotiation of the musical past, within the discourses of his Darmstadt avantgarde
milieu, was crucial for his composition of the sound-mass works. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/6905 |
| Date | 05 February 2010 |
| Creators | Iverson, Jennifer Joy |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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