THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

The degree of alignment of the design of various parameters is, indeed, a very significant
tool in Ligeti’s attempt to shape the form and its rate of change by controlling degrees of
similarity and difference.
While other composers working in Cologne treated these different dimensions as
separate parameters subject to predetermined serial ordering, Ligeti reacted against this
idea, perhaps more strongly than any other aspect of serialism. In his lecture on form at
the Darmstadt summer courses in 1965, Ligeti spoke of the results of such an extreme
separation of stages of the compositional process into “perfectly self-contained” phases,
concluding that, “in the various phases, compositional work was done in which the
character of the hoped-for music was either only summarily anticipated or even not at
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all.” By contrast, in Ligeti’s own music these phases tend to be organized with different
global shapes and types of motion in mind. We already have seen one example of this in
the explanation of Ligeti’s alternative to the duration row and the rhythmic practice of
Apparitions, where the composer allowed himself certain freedoms to shape the music
with the global form in mind. Often in Ligeti’s music these different layers–even when
asynchronized–work together either to effect either gradual shifting textures, when only a
few parameters change at once leading to weak formal divisions, or to bring about more
abrupt changes, when multiple parameters change at once. These two divisions often
correspond, respectively, to internal and external changes.
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György Ligeti, “Form” in Contemplating Music, Carl Dahlhaus and Ruth Katz, eds. (translation
uncredited) New York: Pendragon Press, 1992, 791. This was the text of a lecture given by Ligeti at the
Darmstädter Interntionale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in 1965.
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