THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

Ligeti’s experiences in the electronic music studio, which influenced his awareness of the
intersections of rhythm and pitch. In his lecture on the “Effects of Electronic Music on my
Compositional Work,” Ligeti recounts an experiment carried out by Gottfried Michael
Koenig involving a succession of single events played at different speeds.
In Koenig’s work there were successions of sine tones in which one could
recognize the individual elements. The speed of succession lay over the limit of
blurring of about 50 msec. The succession could be perceived as such. However,
these same tone-successions were contracted in time. That could easily be
accomplished through simple technical manipulation in the studio. Through this,
the single tones submerged into the area underneath the limit of differentiation...
and the progressions, which were originally successive, turned into a
simultaneity. 11
He goes on to express his opinion that, rather than either of these extremes,
it is most interesting when the whole occurrence is not so far contracted... that it
all coincides in our hearing, but rather when it contains some transitional room in
which to play–when one finds some elements over the limit of blurring of about 50
msec, and others below, so that a durational emergence and submergence takes
place, then one time rhythm changes over into tone color, and another time tone
color changes to rhythm. 12
Ligeti terms this phenomenon “Bewegungsfarbe,” or “moving color,” and in his electronic
works, he commonly uses values below this threshold. At a tape speed of 76.2 cm/sec, 50
msec would equal 3.81 cm of tape. Thus, the example from the duration schemes for
Artikulation shown earlier contain several elements which will not sound as individual
events, but rather as this type of “moving color.” Furthermore, in Pièce électronique no.
3, the minimum unit of duration is one centimeter.
11
Ligeti, “Auswirkungen,” 75. Ligeti also begins his“Musik und Technik: Eigene Erfahrungn und
subjective Betrachtungen” in Computermusik; Theoretische Grundlagen, Kompositionsgeschichtliche
Zusammenhänge Musiklernprogramme (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1987) 9-35. with a longer discussion of
Koenig’s experiment.
12
Ibid.
216