THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

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whereas before Section F dominated the shape of the piece. There is one brief harmonic
glissando from the reprise of Event F6 before the last glissando abruptly dies away.
Conclusions
While Ligeti himself was originally quite critical of Glissandi, and in particular the
sectional nature of the piece, this analysis has shown a number of ways which details of
the construction of individual gestures help unite the material across sections and help the
piece unfold in an organic manner. The most important of these details involve the
creation of invariant gestures which have ramifications on the perception of the form of
the piece and also on the conceptual complexity of the second half–a feature to which
Ligeti’s schematic description does not do justice.
While some of these invariant gestures, notably the ring-modulated gestures first
encountered in Section E, are already invariant in their first presentations, Ligeti often
creates other invariant gestures through the combination of elements first presented
separately. The invariance that occurs in Section A around the axis at 13.3" is one early
example of this; others occur on a larger scale when elements from Section B are
recombined in Section C. Yet other types of invariance are created by taking away parts
of existing events. The ring-modulated invariant gestures in Section E are split at their
midpoints and put end to end to change their typical shape from one resembling a diamond
to one resembling an X. In the second half of the piece Ligeti filters out the noise that was
previously a boundary between two events, and in doing so emphasizes the nearly-
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symmetrical boundary gesture between Events E1 and E2. In Section F Ligeti again
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