This piece moves so fast that it almost appears to remain stagnant. The intervals in this develop gradually beneath an extremely busy superficial layer, which contributes to my previous statement. Overall, I found this piece grew tiresome because of the constant movement. There is no rhythm in this piece (which contributed to my feeling that this piece became tiresome) more rather, a pulsation caused from the even distribution of notes occurs.
One point of interest though was that the trichords used consisted of octaves, 5ths, 4ths, tritones and major seconds through this, Ligeti creates a sound that doesn’t sound triadic, through the elimination of 3rds. Thus he works within the tetrachord, minor third and minor second or that done backwards.
Another point of interest is that he plays with texture, creating muddy thickness with so much busyness that you cannot distinguish one sound from another, yet gradually, he makes the music sparser and sparser until you can only hear the main idea in perfect simplicity as a solo. The thickness is usually caused by micro polyphony in contrapuntal texture – and through this, we hear these motifs/intervals, first as hints within an aural stew, but through hacking through the texture and making it sparse, these motific hints become the dominating feature. This happens in the first section of the piece, where the cacophony of sounds mellows down to just the interval of a minor third, and is played in fast succession for quite sometime, and from this deconstruction, Ligetti constructs the next section of this piece on top of this…
Overall, a good work to study, but I just found that it constantly attacked me and offered no aural respite.
Alex
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