Atmosphres (1961) Gyorgy Ligeti

In an article published in the journal Melos in 1967, Ligeti tells an

interesting story of his childhood:
In my early childhood I dreamed once that I could not find a way through to my
little bed (which was provided with trellises and made a perfect sanctuary),
because the whole room was filled up by a fine-threaded but dense and
extremely complicated web, like the secretion of silkworms, which spins silk
around themselves as pupae to cover the whole inside of the box in which they
are cultivated. Beside me there were other beings and objects hanging up in the
vast network; moths and beetles of every kind, trying to reach the light around a
few barely glimmering candles, and big damp-blotched cushions, their rotten
filling tumbling out through tears in the covering. Each move of the stranded
creatures caused a trembling carried throughout the entire system, so that the
heavy cushions incessantly lurched hither and thither and so themselves caused
a heaving in the whole. Now and then these movements, acting on one another
reciprocally, became so powerful that the net tore in various places and a few
beetles unexpectedly were set free, only to be lost again soon in the heaving
plaitwork, with a stifling buzz. These events, occurring suddenly here and there,
gradually altered the structure of the web, which became ever more twisted: in
several places there grew great knots that could never be disentangled; in
others caverns, in which a few shreds of the originally connected plaiting floated
around like a gossamer. The transformation of the system were irreversible;
once a state had been passed it could never occur again. There was something
inexpressibly sad about this process, the hopelessness of elapsing time and of a
past that could never be made good again. 1
This dream from his childhood seems to have a great influence in all his
works. What could seem a chaotic display of objects and beings at a first
sight its actually a complex array of apparently independent happenings, held
together by a larger structure and each of those happenings influences the
others, through the connection to the same structure. The hopelessness of the
elapsing time is not to be passed unremarkably. His pieces always move forward
continually, with no attempts to hold the time back by repetitions or reexpositions.
It is also important to notice that the composer Ligeti as we know today
has not always been like this. The dramatic political situation during his student
years and early professional composer played a huge role in his development.
After the end of WWII, Ligetis knowledge of what was going on in the West was
next to none. Hungary was taken by the Soviets and Ligeti for long believed in
the socialist ideal. Both facts combined made Ligeti to know only a few works
from Schoenberg and Webern by 1955, when the political situation in Hungary
1 GRIFFITTHS, Paul. Gyorgy Ligeti. Series The Contemporary Composers. Robson
Books LTD, 1983.

was less dire and to write pieces that would be easier to understand by a wider
audience. In his own words:
()the political situation was very complex, and the political situation went into
composing. I was then very much committed to the left, though I was never a
communist (Im not a left wing anymore because experience has)
Anyway, I was a radical socialist, and there were many of us who wanted to
believe that Soviet communism was one way to create a socialist system. I had a
lot of sympathy with that, being so very left and having so many friends who
were, and they convinced me that I ought to write music that, you know,
everybody can understand.2
According to Paul Griffiths, Ligeti was writing mostly in Bartok and Kodaly
styles by the time he lived in Hungary. When Ligeti immigrated to West Germany
in 1956, he finally got to know the avant-garde composers of his age.
About a decade before, after the end of the war, in the American occupied
zone of West Germany, a policy of denazification of the German culture, named
as reorientation was put into practice. According to Alex Ross, The term
(reorientation) originated in the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme
Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, which was led by Brigadier General
Robert McClure. Psychological warfare meant the pursuit of military ends by
nonmilitary means, and in the case of music it meant the promotion of jazz,
American composition, international contemporary music, and other sounds that
could be used to degrade the concept of Aryan cultural supremacy. 3 Later on
Psychological Warfare evolved into Information Control, taking responsibility for
all cultural activity in the occupied areas. In keeping with the reorientation
paradigm, military and civilian experts were brought in to guide extant
organizations and encourage new, forward-looking
ones. Many in Information Controls Music Branches had thorough training and a
progressive outlook on contemporary music.4
Festivals of new compositions and summer courses of contemporary music
sprouted around; a perfect laboratory for new composers experiments. Concerts
were organized with the new compositions and sponsored by the American army.
Even the tickets were sponsored and distributed by the American army, to
ensure that there would be an audience for such concerts.
In fact, the Psychological Warfare division was dissolved in 1949, but the
foundations for the post-war music were set.
There could not have been a better place for composers like Ligeti to live
in and work. He moved to Cologne, where Stockhausen got a scholarship for him
in the Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio (WDR), and he
recalls his learnings there in an interview: () the idea of micropolyphonic webs
was a sort of inspiration that I got from working in the studio, putting pieces
together layer by layer. () But it was the studio work that gave me technique.
For instance, I had to read up psychoacoustics at that time, and I learned that if
you have a sequence of sounds where the difference in time is less than fifty
2 Interview with the composer. In GRIFFITTHS, Paul. Gyorgy Ligeti.
3 ROSS, Alex. The Rest is Noise.
4 Idem.

mileseconds then you dont hear them any more as individual sounds. This gave
me the idea of creating a very close succession of instrumental music, and I did
that in the second movement of Apparitions and Atmospheres. 5
According to Paulo Griffiths, Ligeti was more concerned with music in
terms of whole sound qualities than in patterns of notes. He criticised post-war
serialism while it was still an ongoing trend among composers. It is impressive
that a composer barely familiarized with the twelve-tone system until his
immigration to West Germany, levelled concrete questions about a widely
accepted composition technique within a space of only a couple of years.
According to Jonathan W. Bernard, his problems with serialist music can be easily
summarized:
He found problematic 'the organization of all the musical elements' that is, pitch, duration, timbre, dynamics, mode of attack - 'within a unified
plan' because he 'detected within it a discrepancy: quantification applied
equally within the various areas produced, from the point of view of our
perception and understanding of musical processes, radically different
results, so that there was no guarantee that a single basic order would
produce analogous structures on the various levels of perception and
understanding'. Unity, therefore, existed only on the level of verbal
description, 'clapped on the musical events from the outside. 6

According to Sarah Davachi, Despite his interest in the activities of the

composers at Cologne, it is important to note that Ligeti viewed the confident
exhibitions of total serialism with uncertainty and, as a result, internally resolved
to explore an alternative route.7
Griffiths says that he was also doubtful about the usefulness of the
aleatory form which had recently come into vogue with Boulezs Third Piano
Sonata and other works in which the performer has some choice of what to
play in what order. In Ligetis words: it seems to me it would be much more
worthwhile to try and achieve a compositional design of the process of
change.
What Ligeti was doing in Atmospheres, which was shortly preceeded by
the work Apparitions (1959) was the pavement for a new aesthetic form, a
different compositional technique than the ones used by his peers at his age.
Griffiths describes Atmospheres:
5 Interview with the composer. In GRIFFITTHS, Paul. Gyorgy Ligeti.
6 BERNARD, J. W. Inaudible Structures, Audible Music: Ligeti's Problem, and His Solution.
Music Analysis, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Oct., 1987), pp. 207-236 Published by: Blackwell Publishing.

7 DAVACHI, Sarah. Aesthetic Appropriation of Electronic Sound Transformations in Ligetis

Atmosphres. Musicological Explorations, School of Music, University of Victoria.

the rush of much contemporary music is stilled, and what one hears instead
is a play of lingering sounds, vast ominious because of the size of the
orchestra, but acting immediatly on the ear, not asking for interpretation.
Further on: the piece begins very quietly and ends with a prolonged fade,
giving the impression that it arrives from away and slowly departs, as if in
Ligetis own words, opening and closing a window on long submerged dreamworlds of childhood.8
Another key feature of Atmospheres is the employ of micropolyphony. It is not an
entirely new feature amongst his contemporaries or even for himself. According
to Sarah Davachi:
Apparitions, employs micropolyphony in certain sections of the piece, the
technique is maintained and unified throughout the entirety of Atmosphres.
Micropolyphony is a concept particular to Ligetis own understanding of the
aesthetic of sound-mass composition. Like many other contemporaneous soundmass compositions, such as those by Penderecki, Kagel, Varse and, to some
extent, Xenakis, micropolyphony is founded upon a disposition toward the
emancipation of surface texture, the creation of dense sonorities through chord
clusters and the suspension of traditional structures of musical time, form, and
pitch relation. However, micropolyphony extends the sound-mass aesthetic
further, suggesting the presence of active underlying contrapuntal layers that
are revealed over time by way of the comparatively static macro-structure.9
Atmospheres did not bring anything completely new in itself, but
according to Griffiths, Atmospheres takes all of this to a wonderful extreme.
Gesture and incident are flattened out to produce a single sounding substance,
with no break of silence in its duration of eight and half minutes, and only one
discontinuity, when screeching high piccolos are suddenly answered by double
basses six octaves lower: even here the feeling is that the music has
disappeared over the top of the pitch spectrum and reappeared at the bottom.10
He goes further, describing the piece: Also important to the works
continuity is its lack of percussion instruments, except for a piano whose strings
are brushed at the end. The piece opens with a chromatic cluster covering more
than five octaves, held immobile by the fifty-six strings of the orchestra with
flutes, clarinets, bassoons and horns. Groups than fall away one by one to leave
the viola and cellos sounding a space of a little more than an octave and a half,
within which odd notes and pairs of notes can be pulled out in unexpected
crescendos.11

8 GRIFFITTHS, Paul. Gyorgy Ligeti.

9 DAVACHI, Sarah. Aesthetic Appropriation of Electronic Sound Transformations in Ligetis
Atmosphres.

10 GRIFFITHS, Paul. Gyorgy Ligeti.

In his essay Wandlungen der musicalischen Form, published in 1958,

Ligeti states most of his conceptions of micropolyphony and compositional
technique:
the emergence of new conceptions of musical form, transformation of
sound over time, contrast of dialectic and textural characteristics, juxtaposition
of continual and discrete structures, stasis and motion, use of canon to create
multi-dimensional sound, integration in musical space, and neutralization of
rhythm are described. He begins by suggesting that a coherent understanding of
form is not achieved by quantifying parameters such as pitch, rhythm and
duration into pre-determined serialist arrangements. Instead, he suggests that
the approach to musical form should be expanded to emphasize more global
concerns related to surface structure, movement of sound, and distribution of
density across register.12
In the same essay, he also mentioned the concept of permeability:
[permeability] means that structures of different textures can run concurrently,
penetrate each other and even merge into one another completely, whereby the
horizontal and vertical density-relationships are altered. 13
Once again, his conception can be related with his dream from childhood,
described in the beginning of this essay.
It seems clear that Atmospheres is the result of a deep analysis of his
learnings during his first years in Cologne. His dissatisfaction with total serialism
and aleatorism led him to search for new solutions on compositional technique,
resulting in a new aesthetic. His critics on total serialism and aleatorism although
suggest he was not really trying to create something new; he was actually
pursuing the same goals of the composer he criticized. His disagreement with
those techniques was about the effectiveness they have in achieving such goals.
When he points out that there was no guarantee that a single basic order
would produce analogous structures on the various levels of perception and
understanding' and unity, therefore, existed only on the level of verbal
description, 'clapped on the musical events from the outside 14, he is saying
that it would be impossible for a listener to get the desired understanding of
the pieces without the support of some extramusical information.
In fact, the appreciation of the work Atmospheres (as well as his later
works) does not require any knowledge of post modernism concepts. The
colours, texture and its changes are obvious, although they are completely new,
11 Idem.
12 DAVACHI, Sarah. Aesthetic Appropriation of Electronic Sound Transformations in
Ligetis Atmosphres.

13 Idem.
14 BERNARD, J. W. Inaudible Structures, Audible Music: Ligeti's Problem, and His Solution.

in the sense it does not bear any resemblance with the modernism of the first
decades of the twentieth century, not even with Schoenberg or Webern;
composers highly praised during the post-war period.
I believe Ligeti has complemented the concept of modernism in music,
as defined by Albright (2004) as a testing of the limits of aesthetic construction
in this work, by opening a new possibility of compositional form and by refining
the methods of his contemporary peers, making the music material more
objective and clear to the listener, yet not stepping back in time. His concerning
about whole sound qualities rather than patterns of notes created an
alternative to total serialism, dodecaphonism or aleatorism, moving forward in
the sense of creating a new way of musical expression.

Bibliography

BERNARD, J. W. Inaudible Structures, Audible Music: Ligeti's Problem, and His Solution.
Music Analysis, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Oct., 1987), pp. 207-236 Published by: Blackwell Publishing.
DAVACHI, Sarah. Aesthetic Appropriation of Electronic Sound Transformations in Ligetis
Atmosphres. Musicological Explorations, School of Music, University of Victoria.

ROSS, Alex. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 16 Oct 2007
GRIFFITTHS, Paul. Gyorgy Ligeti. Series The Contemporary Composers. Robson
Books LTD, 1983.