THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

illusory idea, unfeasible. It dawned on me that the sound I wanted could be
realized much more easily with an orchestra. 23
Thus, one of Ligeti’s goals was to excite audible frequencies which were not actually
generated through the use of the studio’s oscillators. The staggered entrances and exits of
individual strands may have actually been his attempt to make these emerge
gradually–when enough of the partials were sounding the fundamental would vibrate
weakly, when more were present it would grow in strength. Although this experiment
was not entirely successful, it demonstrates Ligeti’s concern not with the purity of these
sine tones for their own sake, as Stockhausen has implied was the case for his Studie I, but
rather a concern with creating a gradually changing effect from discretely changing
objects, which is quite similar to the effects already observed above.
Ligeti has remarked that, “to label instrumental music as ‘natural’ and electronic
on the other hand as ‘technical’ or ‘artificial’ is misguided –there aren’t really violin
sounds, in ‘nature’ either, this is also quite artificial. The violin was built by man just as
24
much as the electronic generator.” While this quote is somewhat glibly put, this study
shows that there are indeed many similarities in the way that Ligeti treats traditional and
electronic instruments in these compositions–not only in notational practice, or in their
physical implementation, but also in his concern for the irregular or unpredictable elements
in each. There is a similarity in the difference tones to be generated by Pièce électronique
no. 3 and the blurring to created by the piling up of instrumentalists’ mistakes–in each
23
György Ligeti, Ligeti in Conversation, 37.
24
Ligeti, “Auswirkungen,” 77.
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