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Ligeti’s String Quartet Music: From the Published Works to the New Discoveries at the Paul Sacher Foundation
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Bianca, Ţ. |
| Copyright Year | 2015 |
| Abstract | Ligeti’s profile as a composer is mostly defined by such works as Apparitions, Atmosphères, Lontano, Requiem, Lux Aeterna, Kammerkonzert, Volumina, Etudes pour piano, the Solo Concerti , Continuum, Le Grand Macabre , and so on. His music for string quartet is bracketed together and placed unfairly in a secondary position because the author enriched the genre with only three pieces, all of them mirroring his evolution concept during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, documents stored at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel prove that Ligeti’s interest for string quartet music was a constant preoccupation throughout his life; early sketches of string quartet exercises from the 1940s that preceded the Andante and Allegretto were found by the author of the present paper among the manuscripts of the Ligeti Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation, as well as late plans for two more String Quartets (Nos. 3 and 4), dating from between the 1980s and 2000. The two incomplete pieces show, according to Ligeti’s own verbal sketches, a great affinity with extra-European folk music a trait that characterises the composer’s thinking during the last decades of his life and speak for themselves about the interplay of textural stylistic layers in his late music. They represent Ligeti’s customary aesthetic attitude from the 1980s onward, promoting a new set of musical values, and demonstrating his continuous state of artistic regeneration. Key-Words: Ligeti, string quartet, manuscript, Paul Sacher Foundation 1 The Relevance of the String Quartet Music in Ligeti’s Oeuvre Ligeti: the composer renowned for his brilliant way of disturbing the clocks in music [1] and for inventing the “smoky organ” in Volumina [2]. Reasons enough for notable musicologists to enrich the literature about his oeuvre focusing mostly on works from the 1960s onward, and highlighting the pieces for orchestra, choir and orchestra, the solo concerti, the music for piano, organ and harpsichord. Relatively little research has been devoted to the music for String Quartet, and thus a significant part of his output has been ignored. Friedemann Sallis – a leading analyst of Ligeti’s music, in his book An introduction to the early works of György Ligeti [3] refers to the piece Andante and Allegretto for String Quartet (written in 1950), as well as to Métamorphoses nocturnes (String Quartet No. 1, written in 1953-1954) hinting at the idea of illuminating an early stage in the composer’s musical development. Hanspeter Kyburz [4], Dora Cojocaru [5] and Richard Power [6] analyse the String Quartet no.2, acknowledging the piece as Ligeti’s most outstanding chamber work of the 1960s. For composers such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, to Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Shostakovich, Enescu and, more recently, Dutilleux and Crumb, the string quartet represented the most demanding of musical genres [7], not least because of the timbral restrictions imposed by four instruments belonging to the same acoustic family. Ligeti’s published string quartet pieces offer an accurate image of his compositional concept over the years, mirroring the different stages of his mastery spanning only two decades (the 1950s and 1960s). They chart, as if through the lens of a microscope, the broad stylistic development of his oeuvre during those years and give rise to the question of why such a prolific composer wrote only three pieces for string quartet during his life. Latest Advances in Acoustics and Music ISBN: 978-1-61804-096-1 183 While Andante and Allegretto, written for the graduation exam at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest demonstrated, according to the author himself, his own stylistic uncertainty [8], |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://oxca.pw/rikyr_vis.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
