# Ligeti's Piano Concerto: an analysis of the third movement (first part)



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Ligeti's _Piano Concerto_ (1988) is one of my favorite pieces by him. The third movement in particular has so many things going on in just four minutes that I thought an analysis could be interesting for understanding his late period in general (1985-2006, his death).

The movement basically summarizes all the techniques and ideas developed by Ligeti in his late period. Some of these ideas are related to his earlier periods and some of them are new. He had a great curiosity and was always exploring ideas, reading science magazines, and listening to the traditional music of other cultures. All this will prove to be very influential to the ideas he developed later.

But first, a short review of his earlier periods. Until 1956 he lived in Budapest, Hungary. He was a music teacher there. His compositions from that time show a very strong influence from Bartok, and harmonically are tonal (although often complex and chromatic). For example, the Cello Sonata (1948/1953) or the Concert românesc (1951). These pieces have a very strong reminiscence to Eastern-Europe folk music. At that time Hungary was a soviet country with a typical and brutal stalinist regime. Before that, it was Nazi and Ligeti's father and brother (being jews) were killed in concentration camps. Ligeti himself was condemned to forced labour. These experiences marked the composer for the rest of his life (in all interviews, he always mentions it in some way or another).

After the brutal repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (a popular revolt against the soviet regime in Hungary), Ligeti escaped to Vienna with his wife. Then he traveled to Cologne where he met Stockhausen and established full contact with the avant-garde. After some comings and goings with serialism (which was in vogue at that time) he decided it was not for him, because he perceived its practitioners were too dogmatic.

As a response to that, he developed his second style: micropolyphony. And here we can see the first manifestation of, perhaps, Ligeti's greatest obsession: complex polyphonic textures. Briefly, micropolyphony is a kind of very dense polyphonic writing in which the actual voices are not heard, what's heard is a kind of texture that evolves. The texture is the "macroscopic level" while the actual polyphony is the "microscopic level". Ligeti abandons here practically all the traditional notions of melody, rhythm, and harmony. Ligeti achieves these textures by giving to each instrument, say of the string section, a different line. All of these lines start at different pitches so that when played together their simultaneous sound produce chromatic cluster chords (we are talking about dozens of voices each starting at a slightly different pitch than the previous one, often a semitone). Also, these voices play slightly different rhythms, Ligeti assigns to each voice different tuplets. This will prove to be another of Ligeti's obsessions: polyrhythms. Here's an example from the score of Atmosphères (1961). In this period, Ligeti often comments his fascination with the polyphonic technique of Ockeghem.

Ligeti composed some of his masterpieces in this period, like the Requiem (1963-65) or Lontano (1967). But after his only opera, Le Grand Macabre (1975-77), he felt this style was over for him.

After some years of grave illness, he produced the first pieces of his later style.

In this new style, Ligeti is still obsessed with complex polyphonic textures, but now he wants the individual voices to be more "melodious" and actually heard in the texture. In his own words:

_"I was writing a piano concerto, I have started on it about twenty times, but it was still not the real thing, I tried to loosen up the dense polyphony in it. I had already started this in the Kammerkonzert, [Chamber Concerto] and in the piece entitled Melodien, but I would like to loosen it further, so that there should remain a complex polyphony, but I want the individual parts to be more melodious and independent. I should like to return to the large, but not static, form, nor to thematic or motivic work. It is very difficult to express this in words, because I think in terms of music, I have never yet formulated things in this way. I shall try to outline what I have to say.

It is a kind of intervallic and rhythmic basic thought, which I would not call a motive, because the word motive is linked so strongly to the Beethoven technique of motivic development; the large form however must be developed slowly and gradually out of such small seeds, and at different levels. Let us say that the elements stand as small units, and I picture them as static units, like the stones of a kaleidoscope. At the level of the intermediate form there is a kind of metamorphosis, a kind of transformation of these kaleidoscopic pictures, an associative kaleidoscope, which is another thing. At a yet higher level there is a kind of organic proliferation, as when lianas gradually grow over a primeval forest, in other words, a very complex polyphonic lianoid structure. I could say that my earlier pieces are crystalline in nature, and that these are much more vegetative and proliferating pieces."_

So, the polyphony should be heard like one sees a kaleidoscope. The transformations in the textures are influenced by fractal and chaos theory, as well as Escher's drawings (Metamorphosis I; check how the different lines interact and change in order to produce the changing image at the big scale; this is central for understanding Ligeti's polyphony in his late style; the analogy with Escher's drawings is quite literal.)

From the point of view of harmony, he moves away from the chromatic cluster chords to a language which, while still being highly chromatic, it's often constructed using, for example, all the black keys of the piano in one hand (a pentatonic scale), and all the white keys in the other (a diatonic scale). In this way, the clash of the black keys vs the white keys gives a sense of a chromatic free atonalism, while the pentatonic and diatonic characters of the scales give a rich harmonic texture to all this. These kind of devices are often used by Ligeti in this period.

In rhythm, Ligeti is still obsessed with polyrhythms, but the way in which they are produced is completely new and it's influenced by African music. He learned about this music when a student showed him a field recording of influential musicologist Simha Arom. This is what Ligeti heard for the first time in the late 70s. The rhythms and the polyphony fascinated him and he thoroughly studied the papers of Simha Arom.

In 1985 he published the first book of his Piano études. These études were a preparation for the Piano Concerto and we will analyse in detail a couple of them in order to understand the techiques I mentioned so we can identify them later in the Piano Concerto.

The first étude is called Desordre. It has interesting things going on in rhythm, harmony, and form.

In harmony, we have the black vs white keys technique I mentioned before.

In rhythm, we have a clear example of Ligeti using the African technique. What's this technique? In western music, we normally think in rhythm in the following way: we have a meter structure (the bar lines), where each bar contains a fixed number of pulses, the musical phrases and changes usually go in coherence with this bar line structure. The other durations are obtained by _dividing_ this large pulse.

In the African technique, we have the opposite. We start with a continuum composed of very fast pulses. Longer durations are obtained by making an accentuation from time to time over the notes of the continuum:









You may think this is an unnecessary complication. But imagine a very complex rhythmic construction using that and now remove the background notes of the continuum. You are left with the accented notes only. Now, try to play those very complex rhythmic accentuations just "by ear" in a piano  ... it's impossible. On the other hand, if you actually play all the background notes you only need to count them as you play in order to know where to play the accentuation. So, with this technique, very complex cross rhythms can actually be played by a human pianist, for example. This allowed Ligeti to write very striking cross rhythms, some of them never heard before in classical music. Also, the fast continuum in the background gives the music a nice sense of momentum.

In Desordre, the piece starts with this basic rhythmic motif:









Note how the eighth notes compose the continuum (he uses octaves for making the accentuations). Note also that the bar lines separate the phrases in a nice way. We could say there's some sense of meter structure there: the musical phrases are indeed grouped according to the bar lines.

But now he starts to make his "Ligeti tricks":









Note how in the fourth bar Ligeti shortens the bar for the right hand by removing an eight note. In this way, each hand plays the rhythmic motif, but now the phrases in each hand are "out of phase" with respect to the other (this technique is called "phasing", Ligeti took it from Reich). We have a very complex rhythmic interaction between the accented octaves. The African technique is now indispensable for playing all this.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Also of interest: Boulez on Ligeti's polyphonic technique (the one from the late period). (add this after the Ligeti quote)


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