THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

Chapter 2: Analysis of Glissandi
Ligeti began working at the WDR studio in Cologne in February 1957, absorbing
the technical operation of the studio by assisting Gottfried Michael Koenig and also
immersing himself in the works of Anton Webern and composers who followed him, most
notably Karlheinz Stockhausen. The following analysis of Glissandi will show that his
first electronic piece, completed later in that year, bears the influence of both exposure to
new technology and new music, as well as nascent ideas which pervade his later music.
Ligeti had a stipend for the first four months of his apprenticeship in the studio,
1
which he describes as his “second schooling,” and he reports that he spent the first weeks
of this period listening to “hundreds of pieces” of both acoustic and electronic new music
on tape at the WDR and took weeks thereafter just to master the technical apparatus of
the studio. Thus Glissandi, which was finished in August of that same year, was in part a
student work, exploring the machinery and equipment available in the studio. Ligeti and
Koenig later described the piece as a “finger exercise,” and Ligeti had a very low opinion
of the work, when compared to the rest of his output, withholding its premier until 1976,
when it appeared on a Wergo recording. In a conversation after a lecture by Koenig,
Ligeti confessed that,
I don’t really want to interfere with the discussion, and I believe that Mr. Koenig
can say more about this, because, when I made Glissandi, above all, I learned from
him. When he spoke of a “Finger Exercise,” then that applies not to aspects of
form and of musical language, but simply to the quality of the work. Glissandi is a
weak piece, concerning both the sound and form. It has a primitive, almost
1
György Ligeti, “Mein Kölner Jahr,” originally “Meine Kölner Zeit” in Erinnerungen: Neue Musik in
Köln 1945-1971, (Cologne, Materials from the exhibition MusikTriennale 30. Köln : 1994), 16-19.
Reprinted in Ligeti’s collected writings, Matthais Kassel, ed. (forthcoming).
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