legacy, both across the oeuvres of the two composers and within the oeuvre of each
composer. Yet both Berio and Ligeti show a strong consideration, typical of the 1960s,
for such universal musical attributes even beyond goal-oriented pitch structure and
metrically organized rhythm as textural density and timbral balance. From early on
in his career, Berio had a strong interest in writing music often highly detailed and
allusive for instruments beyond the conventional large orchestra, including the
human voice, with all its unique features, and the electronic medium, for which new,
innovative techniques were constantly being developed. Ligeti could be seen as taking
the conventional large orchestra, as well as smaller ensembles, as a sort of raw material
out of which music might start to be shaped not out of the common method of
accumulating many individual musical details harmonic, rhythmic, or otherwise
but instead more abstractly, through overarching sonic attributes. However, Berios
work through the 1960s can be seen as a move toward embracing the large orchestra,
along with the range of effects that it can produce, as a significant musical medium,
even as Ligeti can be seen to have seen the limitations of a music conceived so
uncompromisingly around texture, with its tendency to emphasize purely surface
effects, and to have moved, in a way, toward the sort of harmonic details that he sought
to avoid in his earlier compositions.
I will begin by considering Berios a bit of musical background and some of his
significant compositions from the late 1950s and 1960s, including Thema: Omaggio a
Joyce (1958), Laborintus II (1965), and Sinfonia (1968). One of the most important
moments in Berios early career might be his founding, along with Bruno Maderna
(192073), of the Studio di Fonologia Musicale at the Radio Audizione Italiane (RAI)
broadcast station in Milan in 1955. It was here in Milan that the two leading approaches
to electronic music of the time the Cologne-based electronic approach, using sounds
created purely through artificial electronic means, and the Paris-based concrete
approach, using sounds recorded from the everyday acoustics of the environment
were freely, and simultaneously, accommodated, given Berios and Madernas notion
that method and style were considered matters of personal preference, rather than of
ideology. As if to illustrate the eclecticism that reigned in the Milan studio in the late
1950s, three enormously contrasting works were created there between 1957 and 1958,
including Berios Thema: Omaggio a Joyce, as well as Henri Posseurs Scambi (1957)
and Cages Fontana Mix (1958). The unique place of Berios Omaggio a Joyce among
these three works is shown by the fact that, while Scambi was created from a single
electronically generated source white noise, containing all audible frequencies at the
same amplitude or loudness and provided a completely abstract musical experience,
with no familiar musical points of reference, and while Cages Fontana Mix united both
electronic and concrete methods, ultimately leaving the final realization of the piece
completely open-ended and unpredictable, Berios work resisted this degree of
abstraction. It relied, instead, on painstaking compositional strategies based on the
ongoing tension between a familiar element, the human voice, and the remarkable
electronic transformations it can undergo. 4 The premise of the work is that a female
voice reads from the eleventh chapter of James Joyces Ulysses, a recognized work from
the literary canon, after which her words are subjected to a wide range of tape
manipulations, including montage intercutting, speed and direction change, looping, and
tape delay.
Omaggio a Joyce offers a startling range of sonic effects, to be sure, but its real
significance seems to lie in illustrating the new dimension that electronic technology
can bring to works that unite music, on the one hand, and text, on the other. Berios
particular interest in this union of music and text was no doubt influenced by the
uncanny vocal agility and theatrical intensity of soprano Cathy Berberian (19251983),
his wife. Highly extroverted, she offered an uninhibited approach to vocal performance
an approach, many have noted, that is rarely witnessed on the nonoperatic stage. She
worked to be able to produce the unorthodox and vocally demanding modes of sound
production that Berio began to call for in his works, including half-sung words,
whispered words, raspy tones, tones without vibrato, singing while inhaling, tongue
rolls, tongue clicks, shouting, humming, groaning, gasping, laughing, and coughing.
Especially in her ability to make sudden, rapid, and unpredictable shifts between
contrasting sounds, at different dynamic levels, she could be seen as transforming vocal
performance on the concert stage into a theatrical event.
Laborintus II(1965) was written by Berio as a commission to mark the 700th
anniversary of the birth of Dante Alighieri, the famed Florentine poet. Written for a
large group of instrumentalists and a small group of vocalists, Laborintus IIis marked,
like Omaggio a Joyce, by its turn toward theater and its use of the human voice in an
unconventional way. At various times, the three soloists either sing out brightly,
combining to create semitone clusters, or shout, or whisper, or hum, or gasp, often
juxtaposed against the unsynchronized murmurings of a small background chorus and
the episodic interjections of a range of orchestral instruments. The work, lasting 33
minutes, is divided into only two movements, but on the whole, talk of discrete
movements does little to capture the spirit of the work; instead, the work is
distinguished by the hazy in-between, 5 the fluid movement from one segment or
situation to another. Furthermore, Laborintus IIis often overwhelmingly propulsive,
rather than static, and particularly scattered in its wide range of verbal and musical
allusions: to phrases and images from Dantes Inferno and his Vita Nuova; to idioms
both verbal and musical particularly significant to Berio; and to verbal and musical
elements of Laborintus IIitself, with the text and music serving as running
commentaries, each upon the other. It would seem that this wide array of allusions and
references might only be possible in a work such as this one that has no explicit
action, but it has been said that the work, when performed in concert, tends to sound
like an unstaged opera, 6 as if it has a narrative to project that lies beyond the rather
inscrutable observations provided by Berios own narrator. Aside from the works
overwhelmingly allusive character, particularly noteworthy is the opening of the works
second movement: it quickly takes off like an avant-garde jazz piece, with a space for
an improvised double bass solo and wild drumming, but the jazz element a nod away
from the academic avant-garde, toward popular music soon dissolves into sputterings
of tape music clearly inspired by the electronic music techniques pioneered in Germany
several years before.
In the Sinfonia (1968), also scored for a large group of instrumentalists and a small
group of vocalists, Berio continues to explore the possibilities of manipulating the
human voice in unconventional ways and of imbuing a theatrical element to what is
ostensibly a concert piece, yet he seems to abandon some of the free-wheeling looseness
of Laborintus IIin favor of a more focused, highly structured composition that is, in fact,
shorter in length than Laborintus IIbut divided into five discrete movements. Scored for
a large orchestra fronted by eight amplified voices, the work, despite its clearlydifferentiated movements, retains some of the labyrinthine, multi-layered construction
of Laborintus II, nonetheless, given its continuous commentary on, and reference back
to, the ideas set up in the first movement. In this first movement, the voices explore the
relationship between fragments of text taken from the anthropologist Claude LviStrausss Le Cru et le Cuit, a work that analyzes certain Brazilian myths concerning the
origins of water, including the recurrent theme of a hero whose trials eventually lead
him to death. In the second movement, O King, Berio links this myth to what was
then the recent murder of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Despite this
wide range of verbal and textual allusions, recalling Berios strategy in Laborintus II,
the most striking musical allusions occur in the third movement of the Sinfonia, in
which Berio includes the entirety of the Scherzo movement from Gustav Mahlers
Symphony No. 2, the Resurrection Symphony, and treats Mahlers music as a sort of
fragment from an outside world, contrasting with the frame of Berios own music and
a number of repeated words and phrases the most obvious example being the cry
Keep going! that are set around it. This method of musical quotation in which
Mahlers idiom is not used to shape Berios own musical language, or is not translated
somehow into Berios own idiom, but is, instead, offered verbatim as something foreign,
or un-translatable contravenes the allusive method adopted so memorably by Igor
Stravinsky (18821971), in his neo-Baroque Pulcinella suite, or by Sergei Prokofiev
(18911953) in his Classical Symphony. It seems, moreover, that the third movement of
the Sinfonia has, in its overlap of wildly divergent musical idioms, some equivalent in
the opening of the second movement of Laborintus II, with its transition from a free jazz
section to electronic tape music. Overall, the Sinfonia can be seen as truly a sounding
together, as the title suggests, of disparate musical ideas and influences which are
synthesized, somehow, to become a vast musical river, sweeping along everything in its
wake.
Like Berio, Ligeti had a background in the world of electronic music studios and as a
Hungarian native who fled his country in 1956 had been known in Western Europe
and in America primarily as an associate of Stockhausens at the Cologne electronic
studio until 1960. However, in his 1960 essay Metamorphoses of Musical Form,
which appeared in Die Riehe, Ligeti cited examples from Boulez, Stockhausen, and
other serialists to show how serial principles had either proved self-defeating as the
serialist interest in small-scale, painstaking details of composition often obscured or
ignored the larger whole that was being created or had been replaced with higher
order principles, such as those governing the temporal structure of Gruppen. Gruppen
was, of course, Stockhausens new approach to composition, in the late 1950s, which
worked around a number of distinct formal segments, or groups, each with its own
particular musical characteristics. These musical characteristics governing the various
groups were determined not by individual features, such as harmonies, specific
intervals, or thematic motives, but instead by more generalized attributes, such as
textural density, instrumental sonority, average length of durations, and total interval
content. 7 In his analysis of serial principles in Metamorphoses of Musical Form,
Ligeti arrived at the notion of permeability in music, in which a musical structure is
considered permeable if it allows a free choice of intervals and impermeable if not.
Palestrinas music, according to Ligeti, would qualify as impermeable to a
particularly high degree because it is strictly defined by harmonic rules. For Ligeti,
moreover, permeability and impermeability could be considered features of texture,
rather than harmony: some musical structures will mix with others in a seamless texture,
while other structures will stand apart.
inevitably brings, in a manner that recalls, in a way, Berios Omaggio a Joyce given
that works unexpected electronic transformations of the human voice yet Aventures
relies not on electronic manipulations, but on Ligetis own decision to compose sort
of nonsense phonetic syllables and exclamations, or words, which cannot be found in
any language. The words succeed, however, in evoking a range of human emotions and
responses, including to use Ligetis own words understanding and dissension,
dominion and subjection, honesty and deceit, arrogance disobedience. The words
spoken by the three singers each of whom has five roles to play, exploring five areas
of emotion are punctuated dramatically by the often short, crisp interjections of
instrumentalists, creating a lively interchange that conveys the vicissitudes of the five
personalities that Ligeti presents. With Aventures, Ligeti seems to have widened his
interests to include not only the abstract language of sounds found in the texture-driven
Atmospheres which might be considered a sonic narrative of its own, or an
accompaniment to some other imagined, or implied, narrative sequence but also the
verbal element of words, combined with an abstract sonic language, that can create a
convincing performance and offer meaningful narrative content. Nevertheless, one critic
has said that the expressiveness of the work what Ligeti called the wild
gesticulating of the singers and instrumentalists is ultimately impersonal, or kept at
a safe distance from the listener, as if we [the listeners] were viewing a display of
blazing and naked emotions through a pane of glass, or a sheet of ice. 9 It is, perhaps,
this perceived detachment in Aventures a work intended, it would seem, as a series of
rather visceral adventures in form and expression that may have inspired the many
attempts to stage the work fully, complete with set and props, even though Ligeti is said
to have conceived the work as a piece for chamber musicians to perform in the concert
hall, not in the theater.
In the mid-1960s, as Berios Laborintus II invested the spoken language of singers with
a more recognizable, clearly allusive content, Ligeti can be seen to have moved, in some
way, from work involving the theatrical use of spoken language toward a sort of
reappraisal of his texture-driven music. An element of this reappraisal can be found, at
least in part, in his Lux Aeterna (1966) for 16-part unaccompanied chorus, a setting of a
Latin text from the Mass for the Dead and a sort of complement to his Requiem, for two
soloists, two choruses, and orchestra, of the previous year. While the work is rather
minor when compared to the wide range of Ligetis output during the 1960s, it is often
seen as a turning point in the composers career because it is seen as confirming a
tendency already event in the Lacrimosa of his Requiem that is, of course, the reemergence of harmony in his work. While Lux aeterna certainly features harmonicallyambiguous, texture-driven effects including sonorities that involve clouds of slowlyevolving semitone clusters it also shares something of the more harmonicallyoriented, contrapuntally-based spirit of earlier choral works, such as the Sanctus from
Stravinskys Mass, with its juxtaposition of long, high sustained notes in the upper
voices and rich, dense, forward-moving lines in the lower voices. It is interesting to note
that, early in his career, Ligeti was a teacher of counterpoint, and that for him, there was
undeniably a link a contrapuntal link, even, if counterpoint is understood broadly as
the integration of distinct voices, or strands of sonority, into a larger sonic whole
between his work in the electronic studios in Cologne, his texture-driven compositions
of the early 1960s, such as Atmospheres, and his more conventionally harmonic works
later in the decade. In Ligetis own mind, it seems that superimpos[ing] layers of
recorded sound, 10 as Ligeti described his work in Cologne, was nonetheless related to
his manipulation of sonic texture through permeable and impermeable strands, or
layers, of sound in such works as Atmospheres, and also with his return, in Lux
aeterna, to the sort of harmonic hierarchy in which counterpoint, in its narrowest sense,
can have meaning.
In 1967 the year following the composition of Lux aeterna Ligeti returned to
writing for large orchestra with Lontano. In this work, roughly 13 minutes in length,
Ligeti continues to explore the possibilities of musical texture even as it embraces a
more obviously harmonic palette. The individual lines are less like mere particles in a
sound mass and more like distinct voices, many in number, which are carefully
interwoven into a dense fabric. Like Atmospheres, the work begins quietly and ends
with a prolonged fade, as if it arrives from far away da lontano and slowly
departs, but unlike Atmospheres, with that works strong emphasis on the surface effects
of texture, there is in Lontano a greater sense of space or distance, of a significant sonic
dimension below the surface. This sort of sonic distance, or depth, is especially
noticeable in the way that the simultaneous sounding of very high and very low notes in
the work suggests a high vertical extension, as well as in Ligetis careful attention to the
way that the layout of the orchestra giving the brass more presence than the strings,
for example can affect the space in which the listener perceives sounds. The
element of distance implied by the works title can be seen not only in the spatial realm,
but also in the realms of memory, or of history, given that Ligeti himself considered the
work as alluding to the far-off dream worlds of late Romantic music. 11 In a passage
near the end of Lontano, for example, the soft, lush entrance of the horns was seen by
Ligeti as a sort of recollection, or emulation, of the coda closing the slow movement of
Anton Bruckners Eighth Symphony.
In the end, it seems significant that, at the close of a decade as tumultuous and
multifaceted as the 1960s, both Berio, in his Sinfonia, and Ligeti, in his Lontano, seem
to challenge the formal conventions of musical and to incorporate the ongoing interest
in discontinuity seen more and more since 1945 as a legitimate sort of musical fabric
even as they seem to turn more and more away from the purity of academic avantgardisms, including the interest in the amorphous sound mass that Morgan has seen as a
neutralization of musical content, in favor of references to their own musical roots, or
to musics collective historical memory, in the form of classical Western art music.
*
1 John Cage, in Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical
Style in Modern Europe and America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
1991), pp. 359-360.
2 Morgan, p. 380
3 Ibid., p. 381.
4 Elliott Schwartz and Daniel Godfrey, Music Since 1945: Issues, Materials, and
Literature (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), pp. 115-116.
5 Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.
176.
6 Ibid.
7 Morgan, p. 381.
8 Witold Lutoslawski, in Morgan, pp. 375-376.
9 Stephen Plaistow, in the liner notes to the Deutsche Grammophon recording 423 2442 of Ligetis Chamber Concerto, Ramifications, String Quartet No. 2, Aventures, and
Lux aeterna.
10 Gyrgy Ligeti, in Plaistow.
11 Paul Griffiths, in the liner notes to Deutsche Grammophon recording 429 260-2 of
the Wiener Philharmoniker playing Wolfgang Rihms Depart, Ligetis Atmospheres and
Lontano, Luigi Nonos Liebeslied, and Pierre Boulezs Notations I-IV.
incluyendo Thema de Berio: Omaggio un Joyce, tan bien como Scambi de Henri
Posseur (1957) y la mezcla de Fontana de la jaula (1958). El lugar nico de Omaggio de
Berio el hecho demuestra un Joyce entre estos tres trabajos de que, mientras que Scambi
fue creado de una sola fuente electrnicamente generada - ruido blanco, conteniendo
todas las frecuencias audibles en la misma amplitud o intensidad - y con tal que una
experiencia musical totalmente abstracta, sin puntos musicales familiares de la
referencia, y mientras que la mezcla de Fontana de la jaula uni los mtodos
electrnicos y concretos, en ltima instancia saliendo de la realizacin final del pedazo
totalmente ampliable e imprevisible, que trabajo de Berio resisti este grado de la
abstraccin. Confi, en lugar, en las estrategias compositivas cuidadosas basadas en la
tensin en curso entre un elemento familiar, la voz humana, y las transformaciones
electrnicas notables que puede experimentar. 4 la premisa del trabajo es que una voz
femenina lee en el undcimo captulo de Ulises de James Joyce, un trabajo reconocido
del canon literario, despus de lo cual la las palabras sujetan a una amplia gama de las
manipulaciones de la cinta, incluyendo el montage intercutting, velocidad y el cambio
de direccin, la colocacin, y la cinta retrasa.
Omaggio un Joyce ofrece una gama alarmante de efectos sonic, para ser seguro, pero su
significacin verdadera se parece mentir en ilustrar la nueva dimensin que la
tecnologa electrnica puede traer a los trabajos que unen msica, en la una mano, y el
texto, sobre la otra. El inters particular de Berio en esta unin de la msica y del texto
no era ninguna duda influenciada por la agilidad vocal uncanny y la intensidad de teatro
del soprano Cathy Berberian (1925-1983), su esposa. Extroverted altamente, ella ofreci
uninhibited acercamiento al funcionamiento vocal - un acercamiento, muchos ha
observado, que se atestigua raramente en la etapa nonoperatic. Ella trabaj para poder
producir el poco ortodoxo y los modos vocally exigentes de la produccin sana que
Berio comenz a llamar para en sus trabajos, incluyendo palabras mitad-cantadas,
susurraron las palabras, tonos raspy, tonos sin el vibrato, cantando mientras que
inhalaban, lengeta ruedan, lengeta chascan, grito, tarareo, el gemir, jadeo, el rer, y el
toser. Especialmente en su capacidad de hacer las cambios repentinas, rpidas, e
imprevisibles entre los sonidos que ponan en contraste, en diversos niveles dinmicos,
ella podra ser vista como transformar funcionamiento vocal en la etapa del concierto en
un acontecimiento de teatro.
Laborintus II (1965) fue escrito por Berio como comisin para marcar el 700o
aniversario del nacimiento de Dante Alighieri, el poeta florentino famoso. Escrito para
un grupo grande de instrumentalists y un grupo pequeo de vocalists, Laborintus IIis
marc, como Omaggio un Joyce, por su vuelta hacia teatro y su uso de la voz humana
de una manera poco convencional. En las varias horas, los tres soloists cantan hacia
fuera brillantemente, combinando para crear racimos del semitone, o grito, o susurro, o
ronquido, o el grito de asombro, juxtaposed a menudo contra unsynchronized
murmurings de un estribillo pequeo del fondo y las interjecciones episdicas de una
gama de instrumentos de orquesta. El trabajo, durando 33 minutos, se divide en
solamente dos movimientos, pero en el conjunto, la charla de movimientos discretos
hace poco para capturar el alcohol del trabajo; en lugar, el trabajo es distinguido por el
medio, los 5 el movimiento flido a partir de un segmento o la situacin nebulosos a
otro. Adems, Laborintus IIis a menudo de forma aplastante propulsivo, ms bien que
parsitos atmosfricos, y dispersado particularmente en su amplia gama de alusiones
verbales y musicales: a las frases y a las imgenes del infierno y de su Vita Nuova de
Dante; a los idiomas - verbal y musical - particularmente significativo a Berio; y a los
palabras, combin con una lengua sonic abstracta, que puede crear un funcionamiento
convincente y ofrecer el contenido narrativo significativo. Sin embargo, un crtico ha
dicho que la expresividad del trabajo - qu Ligeti llam gesticulating salvaje de los
cantantes y de los instrumentalists - es en ltima instancia impersonal, o ha guardado en
una distancia de seguridad del oyente, como si [los oyentes] viramos una exhibicin
de arder y de emociones desnudas a travs de un cristal del cristal, o de una hoja del
hielo. 9 que es, quizs, ste separacin percibida en Aventures - un trabajo previsto, l
se pareceran, como serie de aventuras algo viscerales en forma y la expresin que
puede haber inspirado las muchas tentativas de efectuar el trabajo completamente,
completa con el sistema y los apoyos, aun cuando Ligeti se dicen para haber concebido
el trabajo como pedazo para que los msicos del compartimiento se realicen en el saln
de conciertos, no en el teatro.
En los mediados de los aos sesenta, como Laborintus II de Berio invirti la lengua
hablada de cantantes con un contenido ms reconocible, claramente ms alusivo, Ligeti
puede ser visto para haberse movido, de cierta manera, desde el trabajo que implicaba el
uso de teatro de la lengua hablada hacia una clase de nueva estimacin el suyo msica
textura-conducida. Un elemento de esta nueva estimacin se puede encontrar, por lo
menos en parte, en su lux Aeterna (1966) para 16 porciones unaccompanied a estribillo,
a un ajuste de un texto latino de la masa para los muertos y de una clase de
complemento a su Requiem, para dos soloists, a dos estribillos, y a orquesta, del ao
anterior. Mientras que el trabajo es algo de menor importancia cuando est comparado a
la amplia gama de la salida durante los aos 60, de Ligeti se ve a menudo pues un
momento crucial en la carrera del compositor porque se ve como confirmar un
acontecimiento de la tendencia ya en el Lacrimosa de su Requiem que, por supuesto,
es la re-aparicin de la armona en su trabajo. Mientras que el aeterna del lux ofrece
ciertamente armnicamente-ambiguo, los efectos textura-conducidos - incluyendo los
sonorities que implican las nubes del semitone de lento-desarrollo arracima - tambin
comparte algo del alcohol armnicamente-orientado, contrapuntally-basado de trabajos
corales anteriores, tales como el Sanctus de la masa de Stravinsky, con su
yuxtaposicin de notas sostenidas largas, altas en las voces superiores y rico, denso, la
delantero-mudanza alinea en las voces ms bajas. Es interesante observar que, temprano
en su carrera, Ligeti era profesor del counterpoint, y se para l, all era innegable un
acoplamiento - un acoplamiento contrapuntal, incluso, si el counterpoint se entiende
ampliamente como la integracin de voces distintas, o filamentos del sonority, en un
entero sonic ms grande - entre su trabajo en los estudios electrnicos en Colonia, la
suya las composiciones textura-conducidas de los aos 60 tempranos, tales como
atmsferas, y su armnico trabaja ms convencionalmente ms adelante en la dcada.
En propia mente de Ligeti, se parece que capas las de los superimpos [ing] del sonido
registrado, 10 como Ligeti describi su trabajo en Colonia, no obstante fue relacionado
con su manipulacin de la textura sonic - a travs de filamentos permeables e
impermeables, o capas, del sonido - en los trabajos tales como las atmsferas, y tambin
con su vuelta, en aeterna del lux, a la clase de jerarqua armnica en la cual el
counterpoint, en su sentido ms estrecho, puede tener significado.
En 1967 - el ao que sigue la composicin del aeterna del lux - Ligeti volvi a escribir
para la orquesta grande con Lontano. En este trabajo, spero 13 minutos en la longitud,
Ligeti continan explorando las posibilidades de textura musical as como que abraza
una gama de colores ms obviamente armnica. Las lneas individuales son menos
como partculas meras en una masa de los sonidos y ms bin las voces distintas,
muchas en gran nmero, que se entretejen cuidadosamente en una tela densa. Como las
atmsferas, el trabajo comienza reservado y los extremos con prolongados se
descoloran, como si l llegan de lejano - lontano del da - y salen lentamente, pero
desemejante de las atmsferas, con el nfasis fuerte de ese trabajo en los efectos
superficiales de la textura, hay en Lontano un mayor sentido del espacio o de la
distancia, de una dimensin sonic significativa debajo de la superficie. Esta clase de
distancia sonic, o de profundidad, es especialmente sensible de la manera que el sonar
simultneo las notas de muy arriba y muy bajas en el trabajo sugiere una alta extensin
vertical, as como en la atencin cuidadosa de Ligeti a la manera que la disposicin de
la orquesta - dando al latn ms presencia que las secuencias, por ejemplo - puede
afectar el espacio en cul percibe el oyente sonidos. El elemento de la distancia
implicado por el ttulo del trabajo se puede considerar no slo en el reino espacial, pero
tambin en los reinos de la memoria, o de historia, dado que Ligeti mismo consideraba
el trabajo como refiriendo a los mundos ideales remotos de la ltima msica
romntica. 11 en un paso cerca del final de Lontano, la entrada por ejemplo, suave,
lush de los cuernos fue visto por Ligeti como clase de recuerdo, o la emulacin, del
coda que cerraba el movimiento lento de la sinfona de Antn Bruckner octavo.
En el extremo, se parece significativo que, en el cierre de una dcada tan tumultuous y
multifaceted como los aos 60, Berio, en su Sinfonia, y Ligeti, en su Lontano, se parece
desafiar las convenciones formales del musical e incorporar el inters en curso en la
discontinuidad - vista cada vez ms puesto que 1945 como clase legtima de tela
musical - as como se parecen dar vuelta cada vez ms lejos de la pureza de avantgardisms acadmicos, incluyendo el inters en la masa amorfa de los sonidos que
Morgan ha visto como neutralizacin del contenido musical, a favor de referencias a
sus propias races musicales, o a la memoria histrica colectiva de la msica, bajo la
forma de msica occidental clsica del arte.
*
1 jaula de Juan, en Roberto P. Morgan, msica del Vigsimo-Siglo: Una historia del
estilo musical en Europa y Amrica modernas (Nueva York: W.W. Norton & Company,
Inc., 1991), pp. 359-360.
2 Morgan, P. 380
3 Ibid., P. 381.
4 Elliott Schwartz y Daniel Godfrey, msica desde 1945: Ediciones, materiales, y
literatura (Nueva York: Schirmer Books, 1993), pp. 115-116.
5 Paul Griffiths, msica moderna y despus de (Oxford: Prensa de la universidad de
Oxford, 1995), P. 176.
6 Ibid.
7 Morgan, P. 381.
8 Witold Lutoslawski, en Morgan, pp. 375-376.
9 Stephen Plaistow, en las notas del trazador de lneas al Deutsche Grammophon que
registra 423 244-2 del aeterna del Concerto, de las ramificaciones, de la secuencia del
cuarteto no 2, de Aventures, y del lux del compartimiento de Ligeti.
10 Gyrgy Ligeti, en Plaistow.
11 Paul Griffiths, en las notas del trazador de lneas a Deutsche Grammophon que
registra 429 260-2 de la salchicha de Francfort Philharmoniker que juega a Wolfgang
Rihm salen, las atmsferas y Lontano de Ligeti, Liebeslied de Luigi Nono, y las
notaciones I-IV de Pierre Boulez.
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