THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

spectrograph of a passage from near the end of that piece (Figure 4.10) demonstrates
these glissandi both ascending and descending. Furthermore, this same technique can be
found in later works such as Atmosphères.
Ligeti produced a score for this piece which resembles this spectrograph in a
remarkable number of ways. In his sketches, he also listed the succession of individual
frequencies that could proceed directly from one to the next with no intervening rests.
This would ensure optimum efficiency in recording these tones onto tape, and it also
grouped these pitches and durations into individual lines and assigned them to a single
production source–that is to a single “voice”–in a way directly analogous to the lines that
each individual instrument plays in passages such as that shown above in Figure 4.9. This
treatment of instruments in the manner of sine-tone generators is by no means incidental.
With other, slower, glissandi in Pièce électronique no. 3, the desired effect is
slightly different, despite the similarity in construction. The sine tones used in Pièce
électronique no. 3 were most likely the result of Stockhausen’s influence, and the
pervading ideology of the Cologne Studio that the additive synthesis of sine tones (along
with filtered white noise) should be able to produce any conceivable sound. In
conversation with Peter Varnai, Ligeti explains that,
my idea was that a sufficient number of overtones without the fundamental would,
as a result of their combined acoustic effect, sound the fundamental... I planned to
make music out of pure sine-waves with harmonic and subharmonic combinations,
by introducing [these sounds] gradually, not all at once. I imagined that slowly,
different composite sounds would emerge and slowly fade away again like
shadows... When I tried to do all that in the studio, it turned out to be a quite
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