THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

6400 Hz appear, and the nearly-symmetrical gesture which ran across the boundary of
Section E, Events 1-2 is intact. This boundary gesture appears even more integral as a
unit, since much of the noise which marked the division of the initial section’s events has
been filtered out from 5'57" onwards. Ligeti uses a high-pass filter here to remove most
of the noise, which was a continuous and significant feature in the original Section E;
without the presence of this diffuse material, however, the symmetry of these sine tone
strands has nothing to interrupt it, and the result here is a reinterpretation is a
reconceptualization of the boundaries of these events.
Event 2 consists of material from Section C–a section which already incorporates
retrogrades of material from Section B, and Event 3 incorporates many of the same
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gestures, in less filtered form, taken from Section B . The particular surface of these two
events features the most invariant of the gestures–the up and down motion of the highest
register and the v-shaped glissandi of Types III and V in the middle and low registers. It
is here in the piece that the associations between diverse segments of the piece are most
complex. Material that originated in Section B, has been filtered and reversed two
2
different stages, first by Section C as an echo, and then later by Section B . The final
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statement of this material in Section B draws on both of these precedents. This statement
2
has a strong similarity to the statement in Section B , since the segmentation of this event
2
is almost identical to that in Section B –preserving Section E’s 3200 Hz invariant gesture
between the Type I material in the highest register. Yet here the statement is preceded by
its echo, and thus the more immediate association might be heard in relation to this
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