Steinitz on Ligeti

First published Sat, Jul 19, 2003, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/a-composer-s-odyssey-1.366748

György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination
By Richard Steinitz,
Faber and Faber
429 pp, Stg£25.00

Any readers who are unaware of just who György Ligeti is have only to think of the celestial vocal music in Kubrick’s ‘2001 A Space Oddessy’, or the ominous 2-note piano motif which happens at the moments of greatest tension in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. We are speaking of one of the most original minds in 20th century music, who turns eighty on the 28th of May. During his long career Ligeti has refused to follow any slavish doctrine save that of independent inquiry, his compositional approach in pieces like Apparitions (1959) being celebrated as an alternative to the rigid systems of total serialism which was de rigueur during the 1950’s. The same inquisitive thinking subsequently had the composer criticised for having capitulated to tradition with pieces like the Trio for Violin Horn and Piano (1982). It was no capitulation, we learn, merely a reappraisal of previous thought: “The Horn Trio was a calculated counterblast...issued in the belief that every radical stance ossifies, and that true originality proceeds not forwards, but sideways, or zigzag, or even in reverse.” (p. 251).

The author, Richard Steinitz, can speak with authority: he is the Professor of Music at the University of Huddersfield, and a composer, and he also wears the hat of Artistic Director of the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music, probably the most important event of its type in these islands and one of the most important in Europe. Prof. Steinitz writes in the introduction that his approach to documenting Ligeti’s work didn’t start out as a biography, but became one. Much of the material is derived from conversations which the author had with the composer in Hamburg during 2000, and consequently there is much in the book about Ligeti’s life which is new and revealing, some tragic (the death of his father and the murder of his brother), some hilarious (his “Chaplinesque” escapes from the Soviets when on the march to be used as slave-labour after the war). His escape to the West is recounted for the first time, and the heady atmosphere he found himself in when in Germany is engagingly recounted. Imagine knocking on Stockhausen’s front door and having it opened by Bruno Maderna! To use an analogue, it would be like calling to see Mohommad and having the door opened by Buddah.

But this book is more than a biography, for it applies itself to discussions of a more aesthetic nature. It demonstrates in marvellous detail the rigour with which Ligeti applied himself to the complexities of his work. The piano concerto, for example, was begun 21 times (the sketches are available for perusal in the Paul Sacher foundation in Basle Switzerland). It also presents verbal analyses of Ligeti’s music in a very elegant style which uses imagery to great effect. Consider the following. Writing of the appearance of something as common or garden as a dominant seventh chord on F in the first movement of the “Double Concerto for flute and oboe”, a piece from 1972, Steinitz gives us: “Not only is Ligeti’s partial rehabilitation of a clichéd chord the foundation from which flows the remainder of the movement; its half-concealed warmth, below the twisting micro-tonal clusters of solo oboe and wind, is strangely tantalising, lingering in the mind’s ear well after the chord itself has vanished, like the bloom of a perfect complexion glimpsed in a crowd.” (p.194) Or when writing of “Clocks and Clouds” (1973) he gives us the profoundly simple statement: “For music to glide smoothly between clockiness to cloudiness it must be liquid” (p.200). Any writer who can explain complex musical effects to a not-necessarily musically-educated readership using such explicit language and imagery has a head start on others.

The analyses themselves are clearly articulated and are a very helpful guide to the mechanisms and processes which Ligeti uses in his oeuvre. There is also a glossary of terms, which will be necessary even for the initiated: aksak, for example, is a new term to me, but is a Turkish one, coined by a Romanian ethnomusicologist, and is the term which Ligeti approves of to describe the limping rhythms which he borrows from Balkan music (although since the Balkans are no longer under Ottoman control the Slavic neravnodelno would be more politically correct if harder to pronounce!). 

But what comes across most strongly is the sparkling personality of Ligeti, his sense of humour, his irrepressibly inquisitive mind, and his love of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. This book is riveting, informative, and enjoyable and I think it is probably the best book which has yet been written about its subject, whose music has so enchanted and mesmerised aficionados of twentieth century music. Buy it.