Atmosphères

When Ligeti escaped to Western Europe after the Hungarian uprising in 1956 he had more to catch up on than the latest developments in the electro-acoustics. He knew little of Schoenberg let alone progressive young contemporaries like Boulez and Stockhausen and he was as little aware of what he was to reject, like post-Webern total serialism, as of what he would embrace as an inspiration for his own music, like the study in pure orchestral colour in the Farben movement of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces. But in order to realise innovative projects he had had in mind in Hungary without the technique to carry them out, he needed also the skills and the liberated way of thought he developed in the electronic studio of West German Radio in Cologne. His first two orchestral works, Apparitions and Atmosphères, would surely not have been written otherwise or not until after years of trial and error.

Atmosphères, which was first performed at the Donaueschingen Festival in 1961, is the more radical of the two. Ligeti succeeds here in eliminating all rhythmic, melodic and harmonic interest - not in any negative way but by providing so much minutely calculated rhythmic detail and so many fluctuating pitches that the ear cannot possible perceive them individually. One hears instead masses of more or less dense textures with more or less raised profiles and more or less internal animation, according to the way the composer manipulates them. To obtain maximum variety in this dimension he writes for an orchestra of 89 instrumentalists, each one (including every string player) with his own part, each one bearing the paradoxical responsibility of merging his or her individuality with that of the others. The other remaining dimension, which is time, is marked by changes in texture, some of them abruptly made but most of them emerging imperceptibly from the one before.

From the opening pianissimo cluster of pitches covering five octaves, through the central canon for strings in 56 parts - “micropolyphony” at its extreme - to the final passage by way of brushed piano strings into silence, the experience, as Ligeti has put it, is “something atmospheric, that it to say, something floating, indeterminate, almost colourless, merging into itself.” It was a technique which could not be developed much further and, indeed, during the later 1960s Ligeti’s dense textures began to thin out, individual voices emerged, the micropolyphony became less micro. But the discovery had been made and it has not been forgotten.