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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
György Ligeti's music of the 1970s shows a distinct change of direction in its main preoccupation. Up to the middle 1970s his dominant concern was with textural elements, note-cluster development and the use of strict canons to create ‘Mikropolyphonie’. Mikropolyphonie is usually generated by a canonic development where each entry uses the same pitch array but also has a unique rhythmic shape and is therefore unlike-a normal canon (Example 1, below, is a good illustration). Melody, non-cluster harmony, and rhythmic clarity were not usually significant features. However the opera Le Grande Macabre (1974–77) shows a clear, unambiguous change of approach and a greater eclecticism; as Ligeti states: ‘In Le Grande Macabre there is less of the static, slowly, gradually evolving music. I felt I had worn these types out’.
1 Ligeti, Gyorgy, Ligeti in conversation (Eulenberg: London, 1983), p.67Google Scholar.
2 Flute doubling piccolo, oboe doubling oboe d'amore and cor anglais, clarinet, bass clarinet doubling second clarinet, horn, trombone, two violins, viola, violoncello, and double bass.
3 Between the two main sections there is a bridging section of stasis (bars 35–9) which is doubled augmented fourth, a typical device in Ligeti's music to halt a process or create a structural division.
4 This melodic chromaticism can also be seen in the first movement of the Second String Quartet but with octave displacements.
5 See Ligeti discussing Nono's use of the chromatic scale in a serial structure in ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’, Die Reihe 7 (1965), p.6Google Scholar.
6 Ligeti spends much of ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’ repudiating integral serialism.
7 Hall, Michael, Harrison Birtwistle (Robson: London, 1984), p.10Google Scholar.
8 ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’, p. 19.
9 Tannenbaum, Mya, Conversations with Stockhausen, trans. Butchart, D. (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1987), p.73Google Scholar.
10 Griffiths, Paul, Gyorgy Ligeti (Robson: London, 1983) p.31Google Scholar.
11 Ligeti in Conversation, p.137.
12 It is very difficult to sec a pattern in the pitch generation of the last movement – it may have been generated in a similar way to aspects of Birtwistle's music which uses random number tables.
13 Ligeti in Conversation, p.94.