The latest edition of the Paul Sacher Stiftung journal has a fascinating article, by Bianca Ţiplea Temeş, on György Ligeti's sketches for his projected third and fourth string quartets. (Ligeti's papers and manuscripts are, of course, part of the huge Sacher collection, in Basel.) Ligeti worked on these pieces from the early nineteen-eighties until around the year 2000, with the Arditti and Kronos quartets in mind, but, alas, neither work was finished. Temeş writes:
At first, String Quartet No. 3 was meant to be written in a single section ("One long movement with many episodes"), recalling the form of Métamorphoses nocturnes. It then underwent various shapes as a piece in six or three movements, with the duration of each movement precisely specified (12' + 3' + 6' = 21'). The musical language was also very well outlined in words: "Entirely microtonal," "Microtonal harmonics," "It disintegrates through hyperchromaticism typical of Gesualdo," augmented with detailed information on which strings the instrumentalist was meant to play. Descriptions combining visual and acoustic elements of different musical fragments are very relevant: "Gradually it evolves higher and higher (maybe the cello plays in a low register, on the C string, as a BORDUN), the others disappear irritated in the high register through high harmonics, as a lost plane." For each of these characteristics, Ligeti sums up a rich array of extra-European musical influences of a wide geographical spread, stringing together rhythmic and melodic ideas from Burma, Uganda, Great Zimbabwe, Java-Bali, Cameroon, etc. Moreover, he crosses the frontier of art music by integrating references from the fine arts into his verbal sketches: "In Escher's footsteps," "Pinturas negras," "Alhambra ornaments," all articulating the image of a complex personality of twentieth-century culture and leaving unanswered for posterity the question of what String Quartets Nos. 3 and 4 might have sounded like.
That's for sure! Incidentally, I've been meaning for months to mention a significant addition to the Ligeti bibliography: Louise Duchesneau and Wolfgang Marx's György Ligeti: Of Foreign Lands and Strange Sounds, a beautifully edited and illustrated anthology of essays on Ligeti's myriad-minded life and work. Duchesneau served for many years as Ligeti's assistant and was ever helpful to those who approached the master with questions. The new book features Marx on Le Grand Macabre, Simha Arom on Ligeti and African music, Jonathan Bernard and Richard Steinitz on Ligeti's sketches, Wolfgang-Andreas Schultz and Manfred Stahnke on Ligeti's classes, Ciarán Crilly on Ligeti and Kubrick. The accounts of Ligeti as teacher are particularly fascinating, giving us a picture of the man's resistance to any known stylistic party line: he extols Vivier and Grisey, comes round to Shostakovich and Ferneyhough, rejects Nono and Lachenmann. (Ligeti apparently never forgave Nono for saying, after the suppression of the 1956 uprising, "And Hungary is also liberated now.") Steinitz's essay — a crucial epilogue to his great Ligeti book — again demonstrates Ligeti's intensely verbal, allusive approach to the planning of his works: one note about the Horn Trio makes reference to Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, and Supertramp. (See the Benoît Delbecq interview for more on Ligeti and jazz.) Duchesneau herself surveys Ligeti's record collection, which contained vast quantities of non-Western music. She, too, notes Ligeti's fondness for Supertramp, reporting that the group's records Crime of the Century and Breakfast in America are mentioned alongside Balinese kecak music and the rumba band Los Papines in sketches for Ligeti's might-have-been masterwork, Alice in Wonderland. Ligeti, we miss you very much...
