György Ligeti, one of the most important avant-garde composers in the second half of the 20th century, widely known after Stanley Kubrick included excerpts of his work in the soundtrack of the film 2001 Space Odyssey, began his musical career by simply writing a waltz. He was 14 years old and had recently begun his first piano lessons in a small town in the Transylvania region of Romania.
The Second World War would interrupt his studies.
The postwar period
But he survived the holocaust (his father and brother did not). After the war, Ligeti will have to face the new authorities and try to create a new post-war musical language immersed in a society living in isolation from modern Western trends. After the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, he fled to the West, settling in Vienna. There he met Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.
Experiments
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| György Ligeti (1923 - 2006) |
But the experiments of the European avant-garde leaders rather disorient him. He had always been somewhat skeptical of electronic music and also of dodecaphonism. After three years in the Cologne circle, he abandoned the electronic trend to study an intricate rhythmic approach proposed by the Mexican composer of American origin, Conlon Nancarrow.
Études for piano
From the seventies onwards, Ligeti added to his search an interest in the rhythmic aspects of African music. In the following decades his work will see an accentuated emphasis on polyrhythm, leading him to propose very complex rhythmic structures. An example of this is his trilogy Études pour piano, three books each containing from six to eight études written between 1985 and 2001. They abound in influences as varied as gamelan, African polyrhythms, Béla Bártok, Nancarrow of course, and even reveal a debt to the American jazz pianist Bill Evans.
Chinese pianist Yuja Wang offers us the Étude No. 4, Fanfares, from Book I, and the Étude No. 4, Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) from Book II.
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