I forgot to mention that, at the end of my talk on Monday evening, a gentleman in the audience who is apparently a regular reader of this blog asked if I was aware of that composer György Ligeti had written a piece of music called Volumina inspired by the Big Bang. I was indeed aware of this piece, and have a recording of it, but his question gives me the excuse to post a version here. I’m sure at least some of you will have heard some of it before, in fact, as an excerpt featured in the original radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which I listened to on the wireless many moons ago.
You might find Volumina a bit perplexing, but I can tell you that in surround sound with the volume up it’s absolutely amazing. My neighbours clearly agree, and were banging on the wall last night to show their appreciation.
I just spent an amusing evening watching a football match with the sound turned off on the TV and some experimental compositions by George Ligeti playing on my sound system. I thoroughly recommend playing music instead of listening to the commentators, by the way; it’s much more fun! Anyway, a piece that worked particularly well was the pioneering electronic composition Artikulation (1958). Having a look on Youtube I found this wonderful video which adds an even more appropriate visual to Ligeti’s extraordinary sound world than a football match, in the form of a graphical score (created by Rainer Wehinger) which you can follow along as the music plays.
In order to capture the dynamics of the performance Rainer abandoned the conventions of standard notation, concluding it was ineffective in dealing with compositions devoid of regular meter and harmonic scale. The alternative system he developed relied on color, shape, width and position to capture Ligeti’s work. Color in the score was used to denote pitch or timbre, combs represented noise, dots marked impulses and the width of the elements indicated their duration. The video below maps Ligeti’s compostion on to Rainer’s graphical score to demonstrate how effectively it describes the performance.
I imagine many readers of this blog won’t agree with me, but I find the result absolutely fascinating. The visual score has an abstract beauty on its own, but together with the music it creates a particularly interesting effect; each page of the score had me trying to imagine in my mind’s ear what was going to happen next….
Since my recent trip to see György Ligeti‘s extraordinary Opera Le Grande Macabre, I’ve been trying to find out a bit more about the composer. I’ve stumbled across a few of his works, including some very strange and difficult piano pieces which I might put up here sometime. However, I thought it would be nice to acknowledge probably his most famous work particularly because it came up in a previous post.
Lux Aeterna is a choral work for sixteen unaccompanied voices which was written in 1966. Along with excerpts from his Requiem (from the Kyrie and Dies Irae) and the orchestral piece Atmospheres (1961), this composition formed part of the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. What I didn’t know until reading about Lux Aeterna was that Kubrick didn’t bother to ask for permission to use Ligeti’s work in his film and it was only after heated discussions that he agreed to pay the composer a fee. Ligeti doesn’t seem to have minded that much, however, as he subsequently went on record saying that he admired Kubrick’s work enormously.
Lux Aeterna (“Eternal Light”) can be thought of as a kind of postscript to the Requiem and its text comes from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead (in Latin):
Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine, cum sanctis tuis in aeternum, quia pius es. Requiem aeternum dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Although the piece is officially dated later than Ligeti’s setting of the rest of the Requiem Mass, the compositional technique he used seems to be similar and its emotional feel seems also to belong with that longer work. It’s an uncompromisingly avant-garde work, exploiting a dense atonal polyphony to create a strange atmosphere that seems to combine agonised apprehension with a kind of bewildered exhilaration.
Here it is combined with images from the film and various bits of interesting information about Ligeti’s life and music.
I can only speak directly for myself, of course, but I suspect many will agree with me that it’s a remarkably effective piece on its own that has even greater impact in the context of the movie. However, I wonder how many would say that it is beautiful? I know I would.
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In the Dark 