THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

clearly suggests that these are not two separate events, but rather one event, gradually
shiftng the focus of its register from high to low. Due to its barely audible (pppp) dynamic
marking, this example occupies a critical spot in the movement’s development from stasis,
to vibration, to actual motion. While all of the individual pitches are constant in every
regard other than dynamics, the effect of the whole is one of distinct registral and even
spatial motion moving from one side of the orchestra to the other.
This unique gesture, while unusual for orchestral writing, is indebted to a common
electronic studio technique–that of cross-fading. This technique would have been used
whenever composers needed smooth transitions between two events or different channels,
or even to move smoothly from between two different timbres, and could have been
accomplished in a number of ways, either by manually fading out the input to one
microphone while fading in another, or for a small segment, by splicing pieces of tape at
an angle rather than perpendicularly. When spatializing parts of his Gesang der Junglinge,
Karlheinz Stockhausen played a completed segment of the piece through a highly
directional speaker on a rotating table, and physically turned it around while recording it
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back into four different microphones in the corners of the room.
Artikulation, Ligeti’s most sophisticated electronic piece, and the piece which
immediately proceeded Apparitions, makes frequent use of this technique. To intensify
the feeling that the beginning of the piece is fading in from a distance, Ligeti uses
reverberation in a similar manner. In his sketch he indicates that the basic material consists
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Recounted in Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music (Upper Saddle
River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997), 40.
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