Ligeti, Kubrick, musica ricercatta

 
When, in 1968, the Hungarian composer György Ligeti learned that the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick had included a considerable part of his music to the soundtrack of the movie 2001 Space Odyssey without his approval, he did not make a mess as we would have done, normally, in the Western world. By then an Austrian citizen, Ligeti simply sued Kubrick for damages and demanded a financial compensation amounting to the sum of one dollar.

Worldwide audience
Coming from a Jewish family that had been under the rigours of Nazism – from which only his mother was spared –, and himself a child of a totalitarian society, Ligeti believed that Kubrick had only incurred in the indelicacy of not requesting his authorization, although, obviously, the filmmaker had not paid the corresponding rights either. But it was a wise way of dealing with the situation, for soon after the release of 2001... he saw how his music travelled around the world, thanks precisely to that sloppy action.

György Ligeti (1923 - 2006)

Add and go
Kubrick lost the litigation and paid the dollar, we suppose, because in two of his next five films he turned again to Ligeti to create the soundtrack for the films The Shining, from 1980, and finally, for Eyes Wide Shut, his last release, from 1999. We suppose, too, that this time he did pay the fee.

Timbre and "sonorism"
Ligeti's music – at least from the 1960s onwards – is marked by a virtual abandonment of harmony, rhythm and melody (no more, no less), in order to focus on timbre and thereby achieve what he called the making of a "sound mass". A fitting expression of this idea is his work Atmospheres, part of which was used in 2001..., along with his Requiem (accompanying the discovery of the monolith) and the a cappella work for 16 voices, Lux Aeterna. The madness of the central character in The Shining gets full support with the orchestral work, Lontano, from 1967.

Musica ricercata 
It's not easy at all humming Ligeti's work, by the way. There are no tunes here. Although, you can try to recognize a couple of notes in some of the movements that make up his piano work, from 1953, Musica Ricercata, a set of eleven pieces censored by the Hungarian authorities of its time as "decadent" (Ricercare = search; instrumental composition typical of the 16th and 17th centuries). The first movement is built on two notes, the second on three, and so on until the last, built on twelve notes.

Second movement = mesto, rigido e cerimoniale
It is the one that Kubrick incorporated in Eyes Wide Shut. The three notes that the composer uses are: E-sharp, F-sharp and G. But G makes its entrance almost in the middle of the piece, at 1:43, attacked vigorously, and then accelerating to a "tremolo" as the left hand takes up the initial motif of the two notes in octaves (2:04). The movement ends by pressing only the G note, rittardando, until it fades out.

It may first appear somewhat monotonous. But it achieves an atmosphere. As Ligeti would claim,  that's what it's all about.

The rendering is by the Spanish pianist, Vicente Uñón.