THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

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In fact, the instructions in the score to his composition, Essay, Koenig describes a similar
process of generating material, aspects of which were left to chance (although these
aleatoric elements are largely confined to details of frequency curves which are only
schematically indicated in the score), then transforming this material through techniques
(usually serially determined) such as ring-modulation, transposition, filtering, and
reverberation, and finally dividing up the resulting material and recombining it into
sections of the finished piece.
There are, however, a few main differences in Ligeti’s methods in defining source
sounds, distributing these sounds into larger sections, and using these transformational
techniques. First of all, Koenig’s original materials consist of the many possible
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combinations of elemental timbres: sine tones, filtered noise, filtered impulses , and
permutations of these (single elements, their combinations, and the transference from one
element to another). This limited definition of starting material will ensure some basic
similarity between the sounds both within and across sections. The definition of
categories strictly related to these types of materials, and the serial organization of these
categories, guides Koenig’s organization of the larger scale elements of the piece. Ligeti’s
sounds on the other hand are not entirely divided by means of technical production, but, in
some cases by more general categories (e.g. “coughing”) which are less systematically
used. Thus, even at this starting point, Ligeti’s sounds could have been organized by the
19Koenig,
Gottfried Michael. Essay: Komposition fur elektronische Klänge, 1957. Partitur zugleich
technische Arbeitsanweisung. (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1960).
20Noises
are defined as a bandwidth 5% from a given frequency, impulses as a 1% bandwidth and usually refer
to events with shorter durations, see Koenig, Essay, 12.
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