THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

attack characteristics present, and entail a more complicated mixture of different materials
through the body of the sound; in short his materials had the potential to deviate more
widely within a given category.
Secondly, while Koenig’s sections consist of serially distributed material, aiming,
as Boehmer put it, for a more accurate understanding of the process, Ligeti’s are balanced
through more statistical operations. Koenig distributes his basic material serially within
each of the piece’s larger sections so that all of what he terms Material A ends up
inhabiting Section A, and so forth; from Ligeti’s sketches it appears that “words” taken
from the same “text” could easily end up in different “languages,” and subsequently in
vastly different parts of the piece. Furthermore, Koenig uses a different combination of
transformational techniques for each section; thus while they are structurally important
within a given section, the transformations of one section’s material have little bearing on
the others. Since Ligeti’s sounds go through more stages of alteration, (e.g. ring-
modulation at the “sentence” level) the end result will be much farther removed from the
original material, and the characteristics of effects like reverberation will have an effect
across the whole of the piece, rather than section by section.
The relatively simple trajectory of Artikulation, moving from separate sound types
to intermingled conglomerations, stands in contrast to the serial conception of a work such
as Koenig’s Essay or one of Stockhausen’s Studien. Since these serial works are to a
large extent attempting to articulate a structure that is inherent in the row and materials,
the most basic, and recognizable, materials are chosen and their combinations attempt a
serial exposition of all the possible interactions of these sound types. Artikulation, on the
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