Ligeti, Ustvol'skaya, Stockhausen In Memoriam
25 October 2008 • Scotiabank Dance Centre, Vancouver
Solo concert, part of Vancouver New Music’s Solus - The Art of Solo Virtuosity festival. Music by György Ligeti, Galina Ustvol'skaya and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
An article in the US press from December 2007 proclaimed that the past year had been fatal to distinguished artists. Already saddened by Ligeti and Ustvol’skaya’s passings in 2006, I started reading the article, hoping I wouldn’t see any more of my beloved composers’ names. It was not to be. Amongst the names of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pavarotti, Rostropovich, Ira Levin, and indeed many others, there it was towards the end, the name of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Gone was my hope for more Klavierstücke, for a seventh Sonata, and for more Etudes in Book Three. After some time, I decided to put together a memorial concert of works by the three composers. Of course, Jonathan Harvey is very much alive; I added his “Tombeau de Messiaen” to the program as, for Harvey, the piece was very much what this concert is to me – a tribute to a beloved composer who has recently passed away.
György Ligeti – Klavierstück IX (1961)
Klavierstück IX is perhaps the most fascinating to listen to amongst Stockhausen’s piano works. Stephen Drury calls it “electronic music re-imagined as live music on an acoustic instrument.” Indeed, one can hardly think of another piano work – Stockhausen’s or otherwise – that creates and makes use of such a rich gamut of unusual, stunningly beautiful piano sounds, all achieved without the use of any extended techniques. The unpredictable, mantra-like repeating chords, the mysteriously upward-creeping chromatic lines, the sudden flash-like rhythmic gestures, the sparkling grace-note constellations of the ending, all work together to create a “magical mystery tour” for the listener. Roll up!
György Ligeti – Musica Ricercata (1953)
Musica Ricercata, Ligeti’s first large cycle for the piano, was written as an “experiment to create new music from nothing”. What the composer humorously referred to as “nothing” was his use of minimal structures and pitch material to create a large-scale work.
The cycle is made up of eleven short pieces, where the first explores a single pitch, with a second added at the very end. The second piece is built around three pitches, the third around four, and so on, until the eleventh piece, which utilizes all twelve pitches. In a “micro-macrocosmic” manner, each movement creates a powerful and lasting atmosphere of its own – whether it is intensely rhythmic dance, macabre ceremony, child’s-play tune, “pastoral”, barrel organ tune, church chant, “organ” fugue etc. – to fit with the rest in a perfect unity.
The seventh piece, for a first time in piano literature, presents the use of poly-tempo. Previously, Bartok had used polyrhythm; Charles Ives used poly-meter in his piano works and poly-tempo in his orchestral works; Nancarrow wrote poly-tempo pieces for a mechanical player piano. But it was Ligeti, in “Musica Ricercata”, that challenged a single performer with the demanding task of playing two parts in two different tempos simultaneously.
Those who have seen Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut will recognize the second piece from “Musica Ricercata” as the blood-chilling tune played throughout the macabre “black mass” ceremony.
Galina Ustvol'skaya – Piano Sonata 6 (1988)
The music of Ustvol’skaya defies categorization. Galina Ivanovna herself implored those who love her music to refrain from analyzing it. Piano Sonata 6 is her penultimate composition; relentless, horrifying, pounding clusters, with dynamics ranging between ffff and ffffff, and none of the moments of quiet despair and prayer typical of most of her other works, build an atmosphere of total refusal to give up. On this background, a 30 second subito-pianissimo episode towards the end of the work creates the illusion of a giant pause – or breath – before plunging back into the fight.
The only work that came after Sonata 6 is her last Symphony, presciently entitled “Amen”; after that Ustvol'skaya ceased composing.
Jonathan Harvey - Tombeau de Messiaen (1994)
Tombeau de Messiaen is, in the composer’s words, “a modest offering in response to the death of a great musical and spiritual presence”. Harvey continues, “Messiaen was a protospectralist, that is to say, he was fascinated by the colors of the harmonic series and its distortions, and found therein a prismatic play of light. The tape part of my work is composed of piano sounds entirely tuned to harmonic series — twelve of them, one for each class of pitch. The 'tempered' live piano joins and distorts these series, never entirely belonging, never entirely separate.”
Tzenka Dianova, June 2008
