György Ligeti

Composer of contemporary classical music. He has been described as "one of the most important avant-garde composers in the latter half of the twentieth century" and "one of the most innovative and influential among progressive figures of his time".

Restricted by the authorities of Communist Hungary, only when he reached the west in 1956 could he fully realise his passion for avant-garde music and develop new compositional techniques. After experimenting with electronic music in Cologne, his breakthrough came with orchestral works such as Atmosphères, for which he used a technique he later dubbed micropolyphony. After writing his "anti-opera" Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti shifted away from chromaticism and towards polyrhythm for his later works.

He is best known by the public for the use of his music in film soundtracks. Although he did not directly compose any film scores, excerpts of pieces composed by him were taken and adapted for film use. Most famously this occurred in the films of Stanley Kubrick, particularly with the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which also contained pieces from other classical composers.

Described as "together with Boulez, Berio, Stockhausen, and Cage as one of the most innovative and influential among progressive figures of his time". From about 1960 Ligeti's work became better-known and respected. His best-known work include works in the period from Apparitions (1958–59) to Lontano (1967), which included Atmosphères (1961), Volumina (1961–62, revised 1966), Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures (1962, 1962–65), Requiem (1963–65), Lux Aeterna (1966), Cello Concerto (1966); and his opera Le Grand Macabre (1978). In recent years his three books of Études for piano (1985–2001) have become well known through the Inside the Score project of Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Ligeti's earlier works used a technique known as micropolyphony. This is a similar technique to polyphony but with the main difference being the polyphony is hidden through a dense and rich stack of pitches.It can be used to create the nearly static but slowly evolving works such as Atmosphères (1961) in which the individual instruments become hidden in a complex polyphony, with only textures apparent. Ligeti says that after this and his earlier piece Apparitions, he became famous.

Ligeti’s music from the last two decades of his life is unmistakable for its rhythmic complexity. Writing about his first book of Piano Etudes, the composer claims this rhythmic complexity stems from two vastly different sources of inspiration: the Romantic-era piano music of Chopin and Schumann and the indigenous music of sub-Saharan Africa.

The difference between the earlier and later pieces lies in a new conception of pulse. In the earlier works, the pulse is something to be divided into two, three and so on. The effect of these different subdivisions, especially when they occur simultaneously, is to blur the aural landscape, creating the micropolyphonic effect of Ligeti’s music.

On the other hand the later music—and a few earlier pieces such as Continuum—conceives of the pulse as a musical atom, a common denominator, a basic unit which cannot be divided any further.

Different rhythms appear through multiplications of the basic pulse, rather than divisions: this is the principle of African music seized on by Ligeti. It also appears in the music of Philip Glass, Steve Reich and others; and significantly it shares much in common with the additive rhythms of Balkan folk music, the music of Ligeti’s youth.

ANALYSYS OF HIS WORKS

Ligeti's earliest works are often an extension of the musical language of Béla Bartók. Even his piano cycle Musica ricercata (1953), though written according to Ligeti with a "Cartesian" approach in which he "regarded all the music I knew and loved as being... irrelevant", has been described by one biographer as inhabiting a world very close to Bartók's set of piano works, Mikrokosmos.

Ligeti's set comprises eleven pieces in all. The work is based on a simple restriction: the first piece uses exclusively one pitch A, heard in multiple octaves, and only at the very end of the piece is a second note, D, heard. The second piece then uses three notes (E♯, F♯, and G), the third piece uses four, and so on, so that in the final piece all twelve notes of the chromatic scale are present. Shortly after its composition Ligeti arranged six of the movements of Musica ricercata for wind quintet under the title 'Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet'.

 The Bagatelles were performed first in 1956, but not in their entirety: the last movement was censored by the Soviets for being too 'dangerous'.

Upon arriving in Cologne he began to write electronic music alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig at the electronic studio of West German Radio (WDR). He completed only two works in this medium, however—the pieces Glissandi (1957) and Artikulation (1958)—before returning to instrumental music.

 A third work, originally entitled Atmosphères but later known as Pièce électronique Nr. 3, was planned, but the technical limitations of the time prevented Ligeti from realizing it completely. It was finally realised in 1996 by the Dutch composers Kees Tazelaar and Johan van Kreij of the Institute of Sonology.

Ligeti's music appears to have been subsequently influenced by his electronic experiments, and many of the sounds he created resembled electronic textures. The texture used in the second movement of Apparitions (1958–59) and Atmosphères (1961) Ligeti would later dub "micropolyphony".

Lux Aeterna (1966) is a 16-voice a cappella piece whose text is also associated with the Latin Requiem.
His Cello Concerto, dedicated to Siegfried Palm (1966) contains two movements. The first movement begins with an almost imperceptible cello which slowly shifts into static tone clusters with the orchestra before reaching a crescendo and slowly decaying. The second movement is a virtuoso piece of dynamic atonal melody on the part of the cello.
In the Chamber Concerto (1969–70), several layers, processes and kinds of movement can take place on different planes simultaneously. In spite of frequent markings of "senza tempo", the instrumentalists are not given linear freedom; Ligeti insists on keeping his texture under strict control at any given moment. The form is like a "precision mechanism".

Ligeti was always fascinated by machines that do not work properly and by the world of technology and automation. The use of periodic mechanical noises, suggesting not-quite-reliable machinery, occurs in many of his works. The scoring is for flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling oboe d'amore and cor anglais), clarinet, bass clarinet (doubling second clarinet), horn, trombone, harpsichord (doubling Hammond organ), piano (doubling celesta), and solo string quartet.
From 1985 to 2001, Ligeti completed three books of Études for piano (Book I, 1985; Book II, 1988–94; Book III, 1995–2001). Comprising eighteen compositions in all, the Études draw from a diverse range of sources, including gamelan, African polyrhythms, Béla Bartók, Conlon Nancarrow, Thelonious Monk, and Bill Evans.

Book I was notably written as preparation for the Piano Concerto, which contains a number of similar motivic and melodic elements.
In 1988, Ligeti completed his Piano Concerto, a work which he described as a statement of his "aesthetic credo". Initial sketches of the Concerto began in 1980, but it was not until 1986 that he found a way forward and the work proceeded more quickly.The Concerto explores many of the ideas worked out in the Études but in an orchestral context.


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Claude Debussy

French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures associated with Impressionist music, though he himself disliked the term when applied to his compositions.

He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in his native France in 1903. Debussy was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his use of non-traditional scales and chromaticism influenced many composers who followed.

Debussy's music is noted for its sensory content and frequent usage of nontraditional tonalities.The prominent French literary style of his period was known as Symbolism, and this movement directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.
Rudolph Reti points out the following features of Debussy's music, which "established a new concept of tonality in European music":
Glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality;
Frequent use of parallel chords which are "in essence not harmonies at all, but rather 'chordal melodies', enriched unisons", described by some writers as non-functional harmonies;
Bitonality, or at least bitonal chords;
Use of the whole-tone and pentatonic scale;
Unprepared modulations, "without any harmonic bridge."
He concludes that Debussy's achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality".

The application of the term "Impressionist" to Debussy and the music he influenced is a matter of intense debate within academic circles.

One side argues that the term is a misnomer, an inappropriate label which Debussy himself opposed. In a letter of 1908 he wrote: "I am trying to do 'something different' — an effect of reality... what the imbeciles call 'impressionism', a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by the critics, since they do not hesitate to apply it to [J.M.W.] Turner, the finest creator of mysterious effects in all the world of art." The opposing side argues that Debussy may have been reacting to unfavorable criticism at the time, and the negativity that critics associated with Impressionism; it could therefore be argued that he would have been pleased with application of the current definition of Impressionism to his music.

From the 1890s Debussy began to develop his own musical language which was largely independent of Wagner's style, coloured in part from the dreamy, sometimes morbid, romanticism of the Symbolist movement. Debussy became a frequent participant at Stéphane Mallarmé's Symbolist gatherings, where Wagnerism dominated the discussion. However, in contrast to the enormous works of Wagner and other late-romantic composers around this time, Debussy chose to write in smaller, more accessible forms.

The Deux arabesques is an example of one of Debussy's earliest works, already developing his musical language. Suite bergamasque (1890) recalls rococo decorousness with a modern cynicism and puzzlement, and contains one of Debussy's most popular pieces, Clair de Lune. Debussy's String Quartet in G minor (1893) paved the way for his later more daring harmonic exploration, using the Phrygian mode as well as less standard scales such as the whole-tone, which creates a sense of floating, ethereal harmony. Debussy was beginning to employ a single, continuous theme, breaking away from the traditional A-B-A form with its restatements and amplifications, which had been a mainstay of classical music since Haydn.

Debussy wrote one of his most famous works under the influence of Mallarmé, the revolutionary Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, which is truly original in form and execution. In contrast to the large orchestras so favoured by late-romanticism, Debussy wrote this piece for a smaller ensemble, emphasizing instrumental colour and timbre. Despite Mallarmé himself and colleague and friend Paul Dukas having been impressed by the piece, it was controversial at its premiere, but nevertheless established Debussy as one of the leading composers of the era.

The three Nocturnes (1899) include characteristic studies: in Nuages, using veiled harmony and texture; Fêtes, in exuberance; and Sirènes, using whole-tones. Debussy's only complete opera Pelléas et Mélisande premiered in 1902, after ten years of work, and contrasted sharply with Wagnerian opera. Based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, the opera proved to be an immediate success and immensely influential to younger French composers, including Maurice Ravel. These works brought a fluidity of rhythm and colour quite new to Western music.
La mer (1903–1905) essays a more symphonic form, with a finale that works themes from the first movement, although the middle movement, Jeux de vagues, proceeds much less directly and with more variety of colour. The reviews were once again sharply divided. Some critics thought the treatment to be less subtle and less mysterious than his previous works, and even a step backward, with Pierre Lalo complaining "I neither hear, nor see, nor feel the sea". Others extolled its "power and charm", its "extraordinary verve and brilliant fantasy", and its strong colors and definite lines.

Debussy wrote much for the piano during this period. The set of pieces entitled Pour le piano (1901) uses rich harmonies and textures which would later prove important in jazz music.[citation needed] His first volume of Images pour piano (1904–1905) combines harmonic innovation with poetic suggestion: Reflets dans l'eau is a musical description of rippling water, whilst second piece Hommage à Rameau is slow and yearningly nostalgic, taking a melody from Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1737 Castor et Pollux as its inspiration.

The evocative Estampes for piano (1903) give impressions of exotic locations. Debussy came into contact with Javanese gamelan music during the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. Pagodes is the directly inspired result, aiming for an evocation of the pentatonic structures employed by Javanese music.
Debussy wrote his famous Children's Corner Suite (1908) for his beloved daughter, Claude-Emma, whom he nicknamed Chouchou. The suite recalls classicism — the opening piece Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum refers to Muzio Clementi's collection of instructional piano compositions Gradus ad Parnassum — as well as a new wave of American ragtime music. In the popular final piece of the suite, Golliwogg's Cakewalk, Debussy also pokes fun at Richard Wagner by mimicking the opening bars of Wagner's prelude to Tristan und Isolde.

The first book of Préludes (1910), twelve in total, proved to be his most successful work for piano. The Preludes are frequently compared to those of Chopin. Debussy's preludes are replete with rich, unusual and daring harmonies. They include the popular La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair) and La Cathédrale Engloutie (The Engulfed Cathedral), although since Debussy wanted people to respond intuitively to these pieces, their titles were placed at the end of each one in the hope that listeners would not make stereotype images as they listened.
Larger scale works included his orchestral piece Iberia (1907), a triptych medley of Spanish allusions and fleeting impressions which was begun as a work for two pianos, and also the music for Gabriele D'Annunzio's mystery play Le martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911). A lush and dramatic work, written in only two months, it is remarkable in sustaining a late antique modal atmosphere that otherwise was touched only in relatively short piano pieces.

As Debussy gained in popularity, he was often engaged as a conductor throughout Europe during this period, most often performing Pelléas, La Mer, and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. He was also an occasional music critic, to supplement his conducting fees and piano lessons, writing under the pseudonym "Monsieur Croche". Debussy avoided analytical dissection and attempts to force images from music, saying "Let us at all costs preserve this magic peculiar to music, since of all the arts it is most susceptible to magic."

 He could be caustic and witty, sometimes sloppy and ill-informed. Debussy was for the most part enthusiastic about Richard Strauss and Stravinsky, and worshipful of Chopin and Bach, the latter being acknowledged as "the one great master."

His relationship to Beethoven was a complex one; he was said to refer to him as "le vieux sourd" (the old deaf one) and adjured one young pupil never to play Beethoven's music for "it is like somebody dancing on my grave." It was said that "Debussy liked Mozart, and he believed that Beethoven had terrifically profound things to say, but that he did not know how to say them, because he was imprisoned in a web of incessant restatement and of German aggressiveness."

He also admired the works of Charles-Valentin Alkan. Schubert and Mendelssohn fared much worse, the latter being described as a "facile and elegant notary".
Debussy's harmonies and chord progressions frequently exploit dissonances without any formal resolution. Unlike in his earlier work, he no longer hides discords in lush harmonies, and the forms are far more irregular and fragmented. These chords that seemingly had no resolution were described by Debussy himself as "floating chords", and were used to set tone and mood in many of his works. The whole tone scale dominates much of Debussy's late music.

His two final volumes of works for the piano, the Études (1915), interpret similar varieties of style and texture purely as pianistic exercises, and include pieces that develop irregular form to an extreme, as well as others influenced by the young Igor Stravinsky (a presence too in the suite En blanc et noir for two pianos, 1915). The rarefaction of these works is a feature of the last set of songs, the Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913), and of the Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915), though the sonata and its companions also recapture the inquisitive Verlainian classicism.

The second set of Préludes for piano (1913) features Debussy at his most avant-garde, where he uses dissonant harmonies to evoke specific moods and images. Debussy consciously gives titles to each prelude which amplify the preludes' tonal ambiguity and dissonance. He uses scales such as the whole tone scale, musical modes, and the octatonic scale in his preludes which exaggerate this tonal ambiguity, making the key of each prelude almost indistinguishable at times.

The second book of Preludes for piano represents Debussy's strong interest in the indefinite and esoteric.
Some people have claimed that Debussy structured parts of his music mathematically. Roy Howat, for instance, has published a book contending that Debussy's works are structured around mathematical models even while using an apparent classical structure such as sonata form.

Howat suggests that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio, frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence.

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