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« Reply #75 on: 19:41:29, 11-12-2007 » |
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I could only begin to answer your question about Ligeti being 'the MC Escher of music', by the way, Chafers, if I knew what MC Escher was supposed to stand for in drawing.  Anyway, isn't Ligeti the Bridget Riley of music? |
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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richard barrett
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« Reply #76 on: 20:03:35, 11-12-2007 » |
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Nay, Nancarrow is something else. I highly respect Nancarrow. With Ligeti, there's the Nancarrow-influence angle, but also the 'short attention span dramaturgy' angle -- every 'process' in Ligeti goes on for just the 'right' amount of time to hold one's interest rather than for the amount of time the process requires, while CN is happy to let things run to their bitter end. In some Ligeti, this phenomenon is so pronounced that it's downright irritating. The music remains, for example, numbingly confortable (reverse of Pink Floyd intended) for all of e.g., Ramifications, the Requiem, and even Le Grande Macabre. Those are my biggest bugaboos in an oeuvre highly objectionable to begin w/ .
Hm. If it's a choice between Ligeti offering a tourist's guide to musical processes or Nancarrow setting them up and letting them run, I'd go with Nancarrow without hesitation, but the thing is that I don't find Nancarrow's processes so interesting in the first place. |
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thompson1780
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« Reply #77 on: 21:32:13, 11-12-2007 » |
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I'm not very up on Ligeti, but I was very impressed by PLA's Ligeti Etudes at this years proms. So was Ruth, if this is anything to go by. He only did a selection, so perhaps that gets over the 'not knowing when to stop' syndrome. He did 12 - Entrelacs 8 - Fem 10 - Der Zauberlehring 2 - Cordes vides 13 - L'escalier du Diable Any reaction to this OS? Tommo |
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Made by Thompson & son, at the Violin & c. the West end of St. Paul's Churchyard, LONDON
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autoharp
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« Reply #78 on: 08:13:10, 12-12-2007 » |
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Anyway, isn't Ligeti the Bridget Riley of music?
No. That's Terry Riley. Or it used to be. |
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increpatio
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« Reply #79 on: 19:23:34, 14-12-2007 » |
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So who's with me that Ligeti was the MC Escher of music? Suitable for a decorative musical page-a-day calendar.
I am, Chafers. Or at least I see where you're coming from with that. I suppose you might make a similar claim for Nancarrow, who Ligeti stole heaps of stuff from was greatly impressed with at the time of the piano etudes. Having said that, I love both composers' music, from any period, almost unreservedly, so this might not help. Oh, I like Escher, too.  I don't see the analogy mysef, in spite of being an appreciator of both. I don't think there is anyone I could cast in an Escher-class role that I can think of off hand. I'm okay with the etudes. Well; there are some in the middle I think that I don't fully 'get' yet, but overall we have quite an amicable relationship I think. I can also listen to endless Nancarrow studies quite happily; though maybe this wouldn't hold true in a concert situation. |
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #80 on: 00:19:59, 16-12-2007 » |
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I'm not very up on Ligeti, but I was very impressed by PLA's Ligeti Etudes at this years proms. So was Ruth, if this is anything to go by. He only did a selection, so perhaps that gets over the 'not knowing when to stop' syndrome. He did 12 - Entrelacs 8 - Fem 10 - Der Zauberlehring 2 - Cordes vides 13 - L'escalier du Diable Any reaction to this OS? Tommo ...er, yes... I have heard quite a few of these (and we had a piano audition in the ensemble recently so I got to hear a few up close). I'm afraid I also have a problem with the whole thing of a process being set in motion and then nothing incredibly interesting happening to it until it finishes. At least, the way Ligeti does it. Sorry to say it but I have an affection for Musica Ricercata I don't think I could ever feel for the Études - they're very much lower on the 'look how clever I am' factor. Oddly enough, the good old Poème Symphonique for metronomes is really very like so many 'real' Ligeti pieces for me. Very intriguing indeed at the beginning, then really quite dull for quite a while once you've grasped what's going on. Then really quite interesting again at the end (depending on how the last few metronomes tick out...). I'm certainly one of those who wonders what on earth Ligeti would have done in the late pieces if he hadn't found so much to pinch from Nancarrow. I have a big problem with his horn writing as well. Not because I find the overtones thing uninteresting; rather because no one else in the ensemble is ever doing it so you have one line in a harmonic area the rest of the ensemble never enters. My loss, anyway. Although as I see now not only mine. |
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C Dish
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« Reply #81 on: 00:57:56, 16-12-2007 » |
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Because no one else in the ensemble is ever doing it so you have one line in a harmonic area the rest of the ensemble never enters.
And it's not even a 'harmonic area' for exactly these reasons. It's simply a bunch of notes out of tune. The bravo counterexample is of course Mathias Spahlinger's gegen unendlich. Perhaps an aficionado of the bass clarinet ought to give that piece a go? (Needs a trombone, cello and piano, all playing microtones as well) But in fairness to Ligeti, the Hamburg Concerto does represent a major step forward to alleviating this problem of which you speak. Probably also helps that that piece is quite short.  |
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inert fig here
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #82 on: 01:12:30, 16-12-2007 » |
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For me it's not so much that the piece is short; more that there are in that piece some other instruments also doing it, not just one poor horn sticking out like a dog's, er, something or other.
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C Dish
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« Reply #83 on: 01:13:39, 16-12-2007 » |
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No, just also that the piece is short.
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inert fig here
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #84 on: 01:16:05, 16-12-2007 » |
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...which certainly doesn't hurt. Although I found it much more convincing when he added another few movements! (As he did did not he?)
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richard barrett
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« Reply #85 on: 01:17:55, 16-12-2007 » |
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But in fairness to Ligeti, the Hamburg Concerto does represent a major step forward to alleviating this problem of which you speak. Probably also helps that that piece is quite short. Too bloody short if you ask me. Each "movement" carries out a cursory glance around what it might be about, and then stops. Actually shortwindedness is a perennial problem with Ligeti, not just in his Nancarrow-the-easy-way period... Atmosphères (1961) strikes me as a kind of half-hearted version of what Friedrich Cerha did in the eighty-minute Spiegel I-VII (1961). (which I recommend by the way) |
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #86 on: 01:19:01, 16-12-2007 » |
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Richard, how might one come by such a thing?
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richard barrett
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« Reply #87 on: 01:20:57, 16-12-2007 » |
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Richard, how might one come by such a thing?
It's on a col legno double CD. |
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #88 on: 01:31:54, 16-12-2007 » |
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On the way. |
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #89 on: 01:34:31, 16-12-2007 » |
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Well, for what it's worth, for all the higher technical sophistication of Nancarrow, I find the aesthetic experience provided by the Ligeti Études to be considerably deeper, more emotionally and psychologically rich. The hometown, sugary, hilly-billy side of Nancarrow's harmonic language tends to put me off.
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'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
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