THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

Hungary, their particular employment from Apparitions on was significantly effected by
Ligeti’s experience in the studio.
In early versions of Apparitions including the remaining fragments of Viziók and
Sötét és Világos contain clusters, but in a very primitive form, lacking the sophisticated
internal motion of Apparitions in its final form. The extant sketches of these early
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orchestral works are scant, and the final form that Apparitions would have taken, had
Ligeti’s life gone differently, must ultimately remain a matter of speculation, yet in the
example of Sötét és Világos, dating from 1956, we find clusters, moving to tremolos and
even a few clusters near the end where all the instruments play glissandi together. All of
these moves happen, however in discrete steps, and none of the nuances found in the final
version of Apparitions exist.
Ligeti’s early choral work, Észjaka (Night) uses a simple canon to create diatonic
clusters. Here the technique is expressive–coloring the text of “endless thorns” (rengeteg
tövis). Moreover, the relatively slow tempo, the text, and the small number of voices
make the individual lines more perceptible than in the dense massed clusters of the
orchestral pieces. The use of clusters here is a bit of an anomaly, and still used for
contrast, giving way to pentatonic material later in the movement, and to a very melodic,
folk-influenced style in the second movement, Reggel (Morning). Figure 4.3 presents
transcriptions from the diatonic and pentatonic sections of this piece.
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There are four pages of a draft, held by the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel Switzerland, furthermore
these are reprinted in Ove Nordwall, György Ligeti: Sketches and Unpublished Scores 1938-1958
(Stockholm: Royal Sweedish Academy of Music, 1976); they are also described in depth by Steinitz,
Music of the Imagination, 69.
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