“Cystoscopy”, Vacuum and Music of the Spheres
Music – at least a certain kind of music – is not just an acoustic phenomenon, not mere sound play, but also has a psychological, spiritual and intellectual dimension. Tones and tone formations often have a semantics all their own. For some time, musicologists in many countries were intent on studying only the form and structure of musical works of art. Hermeneutic questions were regarded as taboo; it was practically sacrilegious to ask questions about the ex- tra-musical “meaning” of musical works.92 Fortunately, the realization has
won through during the last several decades that besides structure, the “tone”, the idiom, the expression and the semantics of music likewise deserve to be an object of reflection.
As a synaesthetically endowed individual, Ligeti, as we have seen, translated both visual and tactile impulses into music. His many-facetted oeuvre is cov- ered with a dense net of associations. The eminent relevance of this associa-
one especially is that in his oeuvre certain tone images recur, in diverse shapes but with a similar or the same semantics, which is so precise that one can speak of semantemes in the sense of modern linguistics. We will discuss three of such salient tone images/semantemes.
The ninth of the Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet is a “trio” for piccolo flute, oboe and clarinet. It is headed Sostenuto stridente, is to be played sempre fortissimo and takes only one minute and eight seconds to play. It begins with an ingenious
unisono on the three-line e-flat (mm. 1-7) and then unfolds in the form of slow-
ly changing, highly dissonant clusters, which in this high register sound so shrill that they are physically painful (Ex. 5, below):
mm. 8/9 mm. 9/10 m. 10
d3 + eb3 + e3 d3 + e3 + f3 db3 + e3 + f etc.
In a letter to Ove Nordwall of November 67, 1968, Ligeti called the piece a “cystoscopy”93 – an initially rather strange-seeming nomenclature, which re-
fers to the accumulation of dissonances and begins to make sense when one recalls that the medical term evokes the rather painful procedure of a specular bladder examination.94 Interestingly enough, the term “cystoscopy” occasion-
ally also occurs in the sketches for the Piano and the Violin Concerto, some- time in connection with Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony op. 65, whose third movement climaxes in an excited accumulation of dissonances that is likely to have impressed Ligeti.
The “cystoscopic” sound image is actually a kind of topos with Ligeti, occur- ring repeatedly in his works, e.g., in Atmosphères (mm. 32-39), in the first movement of the Concerto for Violoncello (mm. 49-54), in the second movement of the Concerto for Piano (stridente, mm. 42 ff.) and in the fourth movement of the Concerto for Violin (mm. 88-98). “Cystoscopic” sounds also determine sev- eral passages in Le Grand Macabre. In the second scene (ll. 187-189), they illus- trate the perception of a “strange light refraction”, and later (l. 273) the words “Das All ist menschenleer” (The universe is void of humans or deserted). Typically, the catchword cistoscop crops up several times in Ligeti’s notes to Michael Meschke’s libretto.
Ex. 5 Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet, Trio: cystoscopic dissonance accumulation
Another, very expressive sound image in Ligeti evokes the vacuum. A strik- ingly thin, two-voiced “movement” combines a very slowly unfolding melody train in the highest register with pedal point-like notes in the lowest one. Be- tween these extremes, there is nothing – the sense of emptiness emerges au- tomatically. At the conclusion of the first movement of the Cello Concerto, for example, the soloist, over pedal points of the double basses, intones the very “highest” notes: the 13th, the 14th and the 15th overtone (f#4, g4 and g#4). Ligeti conceived this memorable passage as a cipher for loneliness. In a commen- tary, he explained it this way:
“In the first movement, the conclusion suggests solitude and desola- tion: the solo cello remains hanging in immeasurable height over bass- es of unfathomable depth, its perilously thin whistling flageolet tone fi-
nally breaks”95 (Ex. 6).
Ex. 6 Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra: Sound Image of the Vacuum
This suggestive sound image recurs, with similar or identical semantics, in several works, either at the beginning or at the end of movements. At the be- ginning of the “Lacrimosa” in the Requiem, “very softly” entering cluster-like notes in the flutes and oboes are heard over a 13-bar pedal point of the dou- ble basses on the low c-sharp. Toward the end of the Horn Trio (Lamento-
Adagio, mm. 76 ff.), a vacuum of several octaves initially gapes between the low pedal tones of the horn and the ethereally high melody of the violin. Again at the beginning of the second movement of the Piano Concerto, the pic- colo flute hesitantly announces itself, over a long pedal point of the double basses, with sounds of lamentation. One might add that in the fourth scene of
Le Grand Macabre (ll. 623-627), a lone pedal point of the double basses on the
low f, lasting for 19 measures, hints at the mental state of the prince Go-Go, who, after the putative end of the world, seems to be the only being left alive. Emptiness and vacuum are at times linked to the idea of the universe. A very impressive example is the melodramatic treatment of Nekrotzar’s words in the third scene of Le Grand Macabre (ll. 591-593): “Time has stopped, … it ex- ists no more, … for what now is are eternity, emptiness, and the great … nothing!” A detailed note about the poetico-musical conception of the open- ing movement of the Violin Concerto is also instructive in this connection. It is found in the sketches in Hungarian and translates as “Emptiness / vacuum / universe (Ür). The solo violin very high and the double basses very low (pos- sibly bass clarinet [?]. Very softly, from nowhere. In it grow the layer rows, FRACTAL, AFRIQUE, and fill the vast space. End of the movement in full density.”
The head movement of the Violin Concerto in both of its composed versions has nothing in common with this plan – Ligeti evidently distanced himself from it. The notion of a gradual growth of “layer rows”, however, seems to have played a part in the conception of the Passacaglia.
Ligeti had a special penchant for the immaterial flageolet sound. Several of his works include entire parts that consist exclusively or predominantly of flageolet sounds and glissandi. If in the penultimate section of the First String Quartet (from the letter UU on) such tones are still relatively simple in structure (the
flageolet glissandi of the four string instruments are here based on the triads C
major, G major, D major and A major), Atmosphères closes with a texture of far more complexly combined flageolet tones. According to a note in the score,
The flageolet glissandi are to be played very delicately. The individual string players are to be equalized, so that no single voice stands out. “Melodic” lines must not be audible; the individual parts should merge completely into the all-enveloping tender chromatic texture.
This note applies mutatis mutandis also to the flageolet part at the beginning of the fourth scene of Le Grand Macabre, a passage that illustrates in tone- painting the hovering of Piet and Astramor. From a note of Ligeti’s in Mi-
chael Meschke’s libretto we can gather that he had “music of the spheres” in mind for this passage.
When I once spoke with Ligeti about his highly original flageolet glissandi, he reminded me modestly that Stravinsky had anticipated the technique in his
Firebird and Petrushka. That is certainly true. But how much further Ligeti de-
veloped the technique, and what new sonorities he knew how to extract from it!