 A scene from English National Opera's 2009 production of Gyorgy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre. |
Ligeti's creative journey encompasses some of the richest music of the 20th century, and reveals an imaginative world of dizzying variety and expressive power. It's no surprise that of the entire post-war generation who were at the forefront of the avant garde in the 1950s and 60s, it's Ligeti who is played the most. |
Ligeti is the 20th century composer with the most cosmic connotations in popular consciousness.
Ligeti's music in his movies starting with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In 2001, and in The Shining, too,
Ligeti's music (along with Penderecki's and Bartók's) is the sound of the other, the alien, the supernatural:
passages from the Requiem dramatise the images of 2001's monolith – music of teeming, horrifying vastness and unearthly
intensity - and Ligeti and the other modernists become the sounds of Jack Nicholson's psychological dissemblage in The Shining.
Theme from Legiti's score "Lux Aterna" used in Stanley Kubrick film "2001:A Space Odyssey".
From the start of his life in the west, Ligeti was a permanently provocative thorn in the side of any of the received wisdoms and ideologies of the avant garde. Performances of his orchestral pieces from the late 50 and early 60s, Apparitions and Atmosphères (which the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle play at the Proms on 30 August) were a revelation of a new way of structuring music, of thinking about the possibilities for musical language.
Instead of accepting at face value the diktats of the contemporary serialism, or any other of the –isms of the 50s, Ligeti's idea was to make texture as much of a driving force in musical architecture as pitch or rhythm, developing what he called a "micro-polyphony" of incredibly dense pile-ups of musical lines so that you're more aware of an ever-changing amorphous cloud of sound than the movement of individual instruments or voices.