THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

since Section B, yet here Ligeti’s plan calls for the sharing of materials across different
registers to produce a less stratified and more completely intermingled texture.
This intermingling, however, occurs in stages; one can find the entrance points of
similar materials marking each register, ascending from the lowest to the highest. As the
previous materials continue underneath these new entrances, however, the texture
becomes more and more opaque, entrances of new materials are obscured, and the
sounding mass approaches white noise. As the section begins with low sine tone glissandi,
and as these are readily perceived when they enter in other registers, I will define events in
Section F based on these entrances. Event 1 begins around 50 Hz, at 2'37; Event 2 begins
with the entrance at 400 Hz at 3'01"; Event 3 enters at 1551 Hz at 3'12"; Event 4 begins at
3'20" and 5709 Hz; and Event 5, the final entrance of this type of material, comes in at
11,249 Hz, at 3'30". An abrupt cut off at 3'37.3" provides an additional point of reference
which I will designate as Event 6, which entails a change in material which lasts until the
midpoint of the piece, 3'46.5". These are shown in Figure 2.11, a spectrograph of Section
F.
This arrangement of events corresponds closely, though not exactly, to the
rhythmic design of the first half of the piece, articulating many of the points Ligeti
designates as subdivisions of roman numeral III, which are provided on the spectrograph
above. Event F1 corresponds exactly to the span of IIIe and IIIf, although there is no
clear internal division within this span. Events F2, F3, and F4 respectively correspond to
IIIg, IIIh, and IIIi. From this point on, the correspondence is less straightforward. The
beginning of IIIj occurs approximately at the spot where a set of very fast mid-range
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