RECIPROCITY

Chapter:

CHAPTER 4 The Third Revolution

Source:

MUSIC IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

A less expected form of interaction between live and prerecorded media surfaced around 1960, when a number of composers—many of them, as it happened, of East European nationality—began composing works for conventional instruments that emulated “electronic” sounds. Two aspects of the medium particularly attracted imitators. One was the long, gradually and continuously modified sounds that composers achieved in the studio by using filters and voltage-controlled speed variation, contradicting ordinary assumptions about rhythm and the articulation of musical form.

Since rhythm ordinarily implies the articulation of discrete impulses, music that relied on such endlessly continuous sonorities could seem virtually rhythmless. (A good example is the “King Lear Suite” that Luening and Ussachevsky extracted in 1956 from their incidental music for Orson Welles's production of Shakespeare's play, available on a CRI recording, in which “cold and lonely sounds” that continually change, but without discrete articulations, not only conjure up the wind on the stormy heath, but also “suggest Lear's madness, as he wanders in his fantastic dress of flowers and jingles,”⁵⁵ according to the composers’ program note.) It offered new answers to that old riddle, how to evoke romantic “timelessness” in a temporal medium.

The other aspect of electronic music that captured the imaginations of composers who were not otherwise drawn to the medium was its use of “frequency bands” of greater or lesser breadth, a phenomenon that occupied a middle ground between the discrete pitches most instruments are constructed to produce and the “unpitched” sounds that some conventional percussion instruments could furnish. Varèse had exploited that middle ground in the taped interpolations in Déserts, treating it as a sort of synthesis between the pitched and “unpitched” instrumental sounds of the surrounding sections. He did not try to obtain a similar effect using the instruments themselves.

György Ligeti did try. After Artikulation (1958), the electronic piece he synthesized at Stockhausen's studio in Cologne (see chapter 1), he began work on another tape composition, Atmosphères, that was to consist entirely of slowly modulating continuous sounds, the meteorological title suggesting that those sounds had a metaphorical resonance for Ligeti similar to the one that it had for Luening and Ussachevsky (whose suite, by the way, was one of the few electronic compositions to have appeared on a commercial recording by the time Ligeti began work on Atmosphères).

After spending some time developing the work in the studio, however, Ligeti decided to start over and write Atmosphères “for large orchestra without percussion,” as the eventual title page announced. The absence of percussion has been interpreted as polemical, so many works of the 1950s avant-garde having followed Varèse's example by greatly expanding the percussion “section” even in chamber works. But percussion instruments chiefly serve articulative purposes, and the whole point of Atmosphères was the banishing of articulations from a music of constant timbral and textural flux—“a music,” as Ligeti described it, “without beginning or end.” (The list of instruments does include a piano, normally a percussion instrument; but it is played by two executants—“they don't have to be pianists”, the composer notes in the score—one of whom brushes the strings directly and the other holds down the damper pedal; neither touches the keyboard and so the hammers are never activated.)

Even without percussion, the work is scored for a very large orchestra: eighty-eight players on ninety-three instruments (all the flautists doubling on piccolo; one of the clarinettists playing both C and E♭ instruments), each with a separate part, so that by a very strict definition of terms, the work could be described as a gargantuan piece of chamber music. The very beginning of the piece shows why. The opening chord is scored for the entire string section of fifty-six players, each playing a different note but in the closest possible spacing, so as to produce a single huge cluster that covers all the available tempered pitches from the E♭ below the bass staff to C♯ an augmented octave above the soprano high C, equivalent to depressing two-thirds of the piano keyboard simultaneously. (True, Ligeti sacrifices three pitches in the middle to get this registral spread; anybody willing to waste the time it takes to verify the fact will also see that it makes no perceptual difference.) To this eighteen winds add some additional, smaller clusters (and the contrabassoon supplies the lowest note, a semitone below the lowest double bass, so that the cluster covers a full five octaves).

Attacked pp and marked dolcissimo, the chord sounds not particularly dissonant, but rather like a dull and distant roar. It is the closest equal-tempered approximation available to the electronic studio's white noise, the simultaneous sounding of the whole frequency spectrum. And Ligeti proceeds to modify the chord precisely the way (the only way) that white noise can be processed in the studio, by filtering it. Section by section the instruments drop out morendo, dying away by gradual decrescendo to silence, so as to avoid articulating the narrowing of the “bandwidth” until only the cellos and violas are left.

The whole composition is a series of ingenious variations on this basic filtering move, each marked by a rehearsal letter. At B the whole orchestra trumps the first chord with a cluster that adds an octave on either end. It decays at C into a kind of shimmer, in which all the instruments move from sustained tones to oscillations between two tones; but as the full cluster is maintained at all times, the apparent melodic activity produces no discernable change of pitch content. One is reminded of what chemists call Brownian motion, or of Xenakis's statistical “clouds” (see chapter 2)—perhaps another reason why Ligeti chose to call the piece Atmosphères.

The single sharp articulation in the piece takes place at G. Having worked a cluster up by degrees into the stratospheric ceiling range of a quartet of piccolos (a sound that, until digital recording was invented, could not be committed to tape or disc without bloodcurdling “intermodulation distortion” that many took as a sly burlesque of the electronic medium), Ligeti could not resist contrasting it with a cluster in the cellar, growled by eight double basses. That is the only place where he gave in to the principle of contrast rather than slow transformation.

The passage between H and J has become famous as an early example of what Ligeti called Mikropolyphonie—“micropolyphony,” tiny close-spaced canons that cannot be heard as such because of the pitch saturation, but which guide the composer's hand toward fashioning a typically shimmering texture. At K, the composer contrives a kaleidoscopic array of unison doublings on a single sustained three-note chord encompassing two semitones—what might be termed a “minimal cluster”; then (at L) he gradually broadens the bandwidth by adding semitonal adjacencies on either end.

The return of the full orchestra cluster at N, made even more ethereal by the use of string harmonics, is marked Tempo primo—a remark that while perfectly practical (and practicable by the conductor) is nevertheless humorous in the context of a piece that is so wholly without metrical beats, hence devoid of any sense of tempo as the word is normally used. The string harmonics give way to even wispier sonorities at P, as the string players are asked to play with fingers of the left hand only half stopping the strings against the fingerboard so that no focused pitch emerges, just the sound of bow-scrape, and the brass are asked to blow softly without pursing their lips into the usual embouchure, so that only the barely perceptible sound of wind passing through tubes is heard. After a final passage of natural-harmonic glissandos in the strings (an effect pioneered by Rimsky-Korsakov and made famous by Stravinsky), the accumulated sound is allowed to die away in natural piano resonance over a couple of bars of notated “silence” at the end.

Citation (MLA):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 4 The Third Revolution." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 12 Oct. 2024. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-004011.xml>.

Citation (APA):

Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 4 The Third Revolution. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 12 Oct. 2024, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-004011.xml

Citation (Chicago):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 4 The Third Revolution." In Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 12 Oct. 2024, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-004011.xml