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György LIGETI - Works for Piano
Ligeti Edition Volume 3
Études pour piano (Premier livre)
Études pour piano (Deuxihme livre)
Musica ricercata
Études pour piano (Troisihme livre)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Пример: Tempo de Valse (poco vivace - "à l'orgue de Barbarie") (2,8 Mb)
MP3 RAR (102 Mb)
--alt-preset extreme, rar store only
Sony 62308
Études
How did I get the idea of composing highly virtuosic piano études? The initial impetus was, above all, my own inadequate piano technique. The only musical instrument in my childhood home was the gramophone. I devoured music from records. I was not able to convince my parents to let me take piano lessons until I was fourteen years old. Since we didn't own a piano, I went to acquaintances to practice every day. When I was fifteen we finally rented a grand.
I would love to be a fabulous pianist! I know a lot about nuances of attack, phrasing, rubato, formal structure. And I absolutely love to play piano, but only for myself. To develop a clean technique, one must begin practicing before puberty. But I was already hopelessly past this point.
My - fifteen up till now - Études (I want to write more!) are thus the result of my own inability. Cézanne had trouble with perspective. The apples and pears in his still-lifes seem about to roll away. In his rather clumsy depictions of reality the folds of the tablecloth are made of rigid plaster. But what a wonder Cézanne accomplished with his harmonies of color, with the emotionally charged geometry, with his curves, volumes, and weight displacements! That's what I would like to achieve: the transformation of inadequacy into professionalism.
I lay my ten fingers on the keyboard and imagine music. My fingers copy this mental image as I press the keys, but this copy is very inexact: a feedback emerges between idea and tactile/motor execution. This feedback loop repeats itself many times, enriched by provisional sketches: a mill wheel turns between my inner ear, my fingers and the marks on the paper. The result sounds completely different from my initial conceptions: the anatomical reality of my hands and the configuration of the piano keyboard have transformed my imaginary constructs. In addition, all the details of the resulting music must fit together coherently, the gears must mesh. The criteria are only partly determined in my imagination; to some extent they also lie in the nature of the piano - I have to feel them out with my hand. For a piece to be well-suited for the piano, tactile concepts are almost as important as acoustic ones; so I call for support upon the four great composers who thought pianistically: Scarlatti, Chopin, Schumann, and Debussy. A Chopinesque melodic twist or accompaniment figure is not just heard; it is also felt as a tactile shape, as a suc-cession of muscular exertions. A well-formed piano work produces physical pleasure.
A rich source of such acoustic/motor pleasures is to be found in the music of many sub-Saharan African cultures. The polyphonic ensemble playing of several musicians on the xylophone -in Uganda, the Central African Republic, Malawi and other places - as well as the playing of a single performer on a lamellophone (mbira, likembe, or sanza) in Zimbabwe, the Cameroon, and many other regions, led me to search for similar technical possibilities on the piano keys. (I am deeply indebted to the recordings and theoretical writings of Simha Arom, Gerhard Kubik, Hugo Zemp, Vincent Dehoux and a number of other ethno-musicologists.) Two insights were important to me: one was the way of thinking in terms of patterns of motion (independent of European metric notions); the other was the possibility of gleaning illusory melodic/rhythmic configurations - heard, but not played -from the combination of two or more real voices (analogous to Maurits Escher's "impossible" perspectives).
In Automne à Varsovie a single pianist, with only two hands, seems to play simultaneously at two, three, sometimes four different speeds. The piece is a sort of a fugue with diminutions and augmentations from 3 to 4 to 5 to 7. My knowledge of the super-fast "elementary pulse" in African musical thinking made the polyrhythm (and "polytempo") in this Ètude possible. But I am using only an idea from African notions of movement, not the music itself. In Africa cycles or periods of constantly equal length are supported by a regular beat (which is usually danced, not played). The individual beats can be divided into two, three, sometimes even four or five "elementary units" or fast pulses. I employ neither the cyclic form nor the beats, but use rather the elementary pulse as an underlying gridwork. I use the same principle in Désordre for accent shifting, which allows illusory pattern deformations to emerge: the pianist plays a steady rhythm, but the irregular distribution of accents leads to seemingly chaotic configurations. Another fundamental characteristic of African music was significant to me: the simultaneity of symmetry and asymmetry. The cycles are always structured asymmetrically (e. g. twelve pulses in 7 + 5), although the beat, as conceived by the musician, proceeds in even pulses.
Further influences that enriched me come from the field of geometry (pattern deformation from topology and self-similar forms from fractal geometry), whereby I am indebted to Benoit Mandelbrot and Heinz-Otto Peitgen for vital stimulus.
And then my admiration for Conlon Nancarrow! From his Studies for Player Piano I learned rhythmic and metric complexity. He showed that there were entire worlds of rhythmic-melodic subtleties that lay far beyond the limits that we had recognized in "modern music" until then.
Jazz pianism also played a big role for me, above all the poetry of Thelonious Monk and Bill Ev-ans. The Étude Arc-en-ciel is almost a jazz piece.
Yet my Études are neither jazz nor Chopinesque-Debussian music, neither African nor Nancarrow, and certainly not mathematical constructs. I have written of influences and approaches, but what I actually compose is difficult to categorize: it is neither "avantgarde" nor "traditional," neither tonal nor atonal. And in no way postmodern, as the ironic theatricalizing of the past is quite foreign to me. These are virtuosic piano pieces, études in the pianistic and compositional sense. They proceed from a very simple core idea, and lead from simplicity to great complexity: they behave like growing organisms.
In conclusion, some remarks on the not immediately obvious titles. Fém is the Hungarian word for metal, but it has a "brighter" connotation, as the Hungarian word for light is fény. Galamb borong only sounds Hungarian; this title should be understood in the context of pseudo-Gamelan music, as nonsense Balinese. Coloana infinitä is a very tall, columnar sculpture by the great Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi (it Stands in the city of Târgu-Jiu in the southwest-ern Carpathians). With White on White I begin a third book of études; the piece is diatonic (almost exclusively white keys) and yet not tonal.
Musica ricercata is a youthful work from Budapest, still deeply influenced by Bartók and Stravinsky. The first piece contains only two tones (along with their octave transpositions); the second, three tones; and so on, so that the eleventh piece (a monotonous fugue) uses all twelve pitches. A severe, almost noble piece, hovering between academic orthodoxy and deep reflection: between gravity and caricature.
--György Ligeti
Translation: David Feurzeig & Annelies McVoy
+"shoro-bonus"
GUSTAV MAHLER
Symphony No.8 in E flat - "Symphony of a Thousand"
Giuseppe Sinopoli, Philharmonia Orchestra, Philharmonia Chorus London, Southend Boys Choir, etc
Part One: Hymnus "Veni creator spiritus" (45 Mb)
Part Two: Final scene from Goethe's "Faust" (99 Mb)
DGG 471 451-2