THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

with pages of Ligeti’s sketches, and are accompanied by the composer’s description of
these sections as “dialogues,” “monologues,” and so forth, there are problems with taking
these divisions as having equal structural weight in the form of the piece. More likely they
were of use in executing steps towards the pieces creation. Section A, for example, has
12 subsections and makes up nearly 70% of the piece, while sections B-G have no
subsections and all combined are less than half of the duration of A. Thus while Doati
proceeds without any reference to the composer’s comments, Wehinger, in my view,
follows Ligeti’s sections too literally and falls into a common mistake which T.W. Adorno,
among others warns against, saying that, “one should not overvalue the genesis of the
music... and should not, above all, confuse it with the inner dynamics of the
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composition.” My accounts of both pieces will attempt to balance the composer’s
descriptions of the pieces’ construction with a more perceptually informed discussion of
how the piece unfolds.
Analytical Methodology
Achieving a level of detailed analysis while balancing different representations of
musical structure will require a methodology for the analysis of electroacoustic music, a
field in which there is, as of yet, no commonly agreed-upon theory. While McAdams’s
five areas of inquiry, mentioned briefly above in relation to Doati’s analysis, are a good
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starting point for a theory of listening, including the type of “structural listening” that
20T.W.
Adorno, “On the Problem of Musical Analysis,” trans. Max Paddison, Music Analysis 1, no. 2 (Jul.
1982), 183-84.
21Ibid,
173.
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