Ejecución de sentencias de condena por parte del Estado

“Keeping to one and the same basic order led to incompati- ble structures. The unity existed only on the level of the commentary, the verbal description of the composition; it was imposed ab extra upon the musical processes and re- mained psychologically ineffective.”132

“I reacted to serial music exactly as I did to my own composi- tional procedures, at once negating and extending, that is, modifying.”133

On June 19, 1960, Ligeti’s Apparitions were first performed at the Festival of the International Society for New Music in Cologne. The premiere was a sen- sation: the world took notice. The new work differed drastically from what one was accustomed to hearing. One could tell that the hitherto little-known

realized that he could not be assigned to any of the tendencies of avant-garde music then paramount

At the time of the premiere, Ligeti had been in the West for three-and-a- half years. He was profoundly impressed by the New Music he was getting to know. In the Cologne Studio, in 1957/58, he gained experiences with elec- tronic music. Here he studied electro-acoustics and phonetics, and here he experimented with electronic sound materials, which fascinated him not least for their similarity to phonemes. He exchanged ideas with Karlheinz Stock- hausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig and above all studied the scores of Pierre Boulez.

The nineteen-fifties were the years of serial music. Serialism had spread like a religious doctrine and had put many young composers into a state of eupho- ria. They were fascinated by the idea that all parameters of a musical work of art could be fixed by series in advance. No less an authority than Ernst Krenek coined the aperçu that serialism had at last liberated the composer from the dictatorship of the idea.134 _{Herbert Eimert, on the contrary, protest-}

ed against the assumption that serial composition meant “total predetermina- tion.” It was wrong, in his view, to think that the margin of choice was re- duced to zero. The very opposite was the case, for every new serial level brought “countless new possible connections into play”, and with every newly added serial constraint the “decision coefficient” grew and differentiated.135

The pioneer of serialism was Olivier Messiaen, in whose epochal piano piece

Mode de valeurs et d’ intensités of 1949 not only the pitches but also the dura-

tions, the nature of the touch and the degrees of intensity are serially orga- nized. Messiaen’s pupils Karel Goeyvaerts, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen took up from there. Thus the three twelve-member rows on which Boulez based his composition Structure Ia determine both the pitches (“tone qualities”), the note durations and the dynamics, while a ten-member row dictates the touch (Ex. 11).

In a widely noted essay, Ligeti not only contributed a minute analysis of Bou- lez’ Structure Ia but also set forth a fundamental discussion of the process of serial composition. He thought he could distinguish three “work phases”: Decision I – Automatism – Decision II. The first phase involved selecting the compositional elements, choosing their particular arrangement and determin- ing the subsequent operations. In the second phase, elements and operations were thrown “quasi into a machine”, in order “to be woven automatically into structures on the basis of the relations chosen.” By means of several exam- ples, Ligeti was able to show that irregular deviations from the strictly applied serialist principle occur in Boulez’ Structure Ia, and he drew the conclusion that compositional decisions and automatisms presupposed each other: “the mu- tually affecting decisions inevitably lead to automatisms, determination pro- duces the unforeseeable; and conversely, neither the automatic nor the fortui- tous can be brought about without decision and determination.” In conclu- sion, he opined (not without some irony) that Boulez had to break out of the “ascetic, almost compulsion-neurotic posture” he had assumed in composing the Structure, in order to create something totally opposite, namely the “mot- ley, sensual feline world” of the Marteau sans maître.136

If we now look more closely at the rule of serial composition, we must first of all speak of three axioms to which the serialists referred: the doctrine that in the structure of the musical work of art all elements (pitch, duration, timbre, intensity) have equal rights; the consequent insistence that all the elements should be organized according to a uniform principle of order , such as a log- arithmic numerical row; and finally, the confidence that the pseudo- mathematical logic of the construction would also guarantee the musical one. After a detailed study of many different scores, Ligeti called the truth claim of these axioms in question, argued that the individual elements in the structure of the composition did not all have to have the same relevance, and showed convincingly that the pseudo-mathematical logic of the musical construction neither guaranteed musical coherence nor had any exact correlate in the struc- ture of psychic perception.

The conclusions he drew for his own work from these findings are weighty ones and in the last analysis signify the questioning and even the nullification of the serial principles. To begin with, he annulled the law of the uniform or- ganization of the parameters. Thus in Apparitions (and also in Atmosphères) he worked, not with twelve-tone rows but with clusters. He did not, in principle, abandon the determination of the remaining parameters; nevertheless, the rhythmic relations are organized differently than the dynamic ones in his

Whereas according to a serialist postulate the durational values of a row – re- gardless of whether very short or very long – should occur with equal fre- quency, Ligeti arranged the durations in Apparitions in such a way that brevity and length respectively are made the criterion of frequency: in other words, the shortest element recurs most frequently, the longest only once.

How much care he devoted to durational organization is evident from the drafts for Apparitions. Ligeti’s calculations there reveal that he sought to rec- ord all possible durations and ordered them in rows. One of his tables lists no fewer than 192 durations, no.1 being a thirty-second, no. 192 a unit of three maximae (3 x 64 = 192). In another table, which lists thirteen elements, the shortest of them is one sixteenth, the longest a unit of eight whole notes; here the shortest element is intended to recur 80 times, whereas the longest values are to occur only once.137