Concerts & Tickets

Programme note

György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Ramifications (1969)

György (George) Ligeti was one of the giants of the mid-20th century avant-garde. Like his compatriot Bartók, he was born in Transylvania, now part of Romania, in 1923 in the town of Dicsőszentmárton (now Târnava-Sânmărtin, or Tîrnăveni, near Sighişoara).

He came from a Hungarian Jewish family (his surname Ligeti means ‘wood’). When György was aged six, his parents moved to Kolozsvár (Cluj), where he began studying music. Tragedy ensued: during the Second World War the family was broken up and deported to Mauthausen and Auschwitz. Both his father and his brother perished.

He himself was sent to a labour camp. After the war he moved to Hungary’s capital, Budapest, to study with the great composer/teachers Ferenc Farkas and Sándor Veress (and also with Kodály). He taught for several years (1950-56) at the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest’s music conservatoire, until the Hungarian Revolution led to his flight in 1956 to first Austria and later Germany (Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg).

During this time Ligeti was composing, both in a more traditional Hungarian folk style (like Kodály), which yielded works such as the Concert Romanesc (also in the SCO’s programme this season) and experimentally, inspired by developments in modern music encouraged by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and at Darmstadt, where he himself taught from 1959 to 1972.

In Vienna his interest was aroused by Serialism, and in Cologne he worked in Stockhausen’s electronic studio. Yet Ligeti never fully espoused either, or indeed any kind of dogma, but rather pursued his own path. The result was a series of major works: Apparitions and Atmosphères (for orchestra); Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures (with solo voices); and his massive choral Requiem.

Tonight’s work belongs, like Lontano, the Chamber Concerto and Second String Quartet, to the late 1960s. Ligeti thereafter somewhat purified and simplified his style, emphasising anew the traditional elements of harmony, rhythm and melody. By contrast, Ramifications, like his earlier experimental works, focuses on his fascination with dense textures and a kind of hyperactivity within them. He himself used the word ‘micropolyphony’, and in ways Ligeti’s music does indeed echo the more elaborate polyphony of medieval composers like Isaac or Josquin des Pres, or even Tallis’s 40-part motet.

Large blocks of sound are built up, often seeming to shift rapidly but in fact changing very slowly, or at other times appearing stately while in fact altering harmonically at great speed. (As with his Russian contemporary Schnittke, ‘polytonality’ might also seem appropriate, for any key allegiances in middle period Ligeti are often tangential, multifarious and varied.

It’s best not to try to ‘follow’, let alone ‘understand’, every note of Ramifications; better, rather, to let the overall effect work on you. Think of its clusterings (like a busy beehive!) as a kind of polyphony: slightly eerie, with shades of electric pylons (Ligeti’s Atmosphères was ‘borrowed’ for Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey). The violin rockings, achings and tautness gradually subside and lower strings take over (notice the haunting wind-like sounds ands flurries in the middle strings, not just the pounding double basses). Yet despite all this activity and shifting perspectives, we are still, effectively, in the same place: where we began.

The Hitchcock-like bees return. And (as ‘what goes up must come down’!) we begin descending. Despite all the scurrying, angrier bits, it’s not a bad idea to think of Ramifications as almost prayerful: like a work by (say) Arvo Pärt. That’s certainly what the closing section suggests, with its ethereal harmonics and deep, low double bass, as the violins gradually patter out like rain.

© Roderic Dunnett