This week’s theme is…Get Your Exercise! If you want to get stronger, you’ll go to a gym and work out. But musicians can get stronger too, and to get their exercise, they might practice an etude, which is a French word for a piece of music written to strengthen a particular skill. Etudes run the gamut from dry technique builders to stunning, complete musical statements that are worth hearing beyond their use to improve musicians’ aptitude. This week look at some such examples.
Get Your Exercise, Day 2 – Etude No. 8, “Metal” by Gyorgy Ligeti
Not all college music programs are large enough to demand a professor of organ, but the College of Musical Arts at Bowling Green State University is one that is. The organ professor during my time there served as a resource not only for students of organ performance, but also for student composers with ambitions to write for the noble instrument. While I never take advantage of the opportunity myself, I was aware of colleagues who did, and occasionally I would glean little chestnuts from their interactions with him. The one that I remember the best, while certainly not an original observation, is considerably profound and important nonetheless: where the piano is a percussion instrument, the organ is a woodwind instrument. The difference is very important to understand for composers and performers. While the two instruments bear a superficial similarity given their keyboard input, the tone production mechanisms and the way they respond to the performer’s input could not be more different.
The hammered strings of the piano make it ideal for lively and intricate rhythms. The piano is incredibly versatile, so it is capable of a wide variety of other textures also (see this post). The organ, on the other hand, is basically a keyboard-controlled wind band. While it is possible to create lively figurations on the organ (that’s much of what Bach’s keyboard works are all about, after all), its responsiveness has its limits, and is generally much better suited to idioms which evoke human song and its tendency toward sustaining long, lyrical lines with breath support. As such, the two instruments are useful for giving composers the opportunity to work in very different manners, exploring varied elements of their individual voices.
Gyorgy Ligeti is the most recent in a rather exclusive club, famous classical composers to come out of Hungary. Hungary’s modest but stalwart musical tradition has yielded a small but mighty handful of composers, all of whom spoke with a distinctive, goulashy accent, to paraphrase Leonard Bernstein. While Liszt is the earliest (see this post), he does not quite fit the mold of the later ones. All the rest worked during the twentieth century. If you want to get your feet wet with Hungarian composers, Zoltan Kodaly is by far the most accessible (see this post). Somewhat less accessible is the strongest and most enduring of the Hungarian composers, Bela Bartok; his works run the gamut from short, folk-song inspired pedagogical pieces to large-scale symphonic works on par with the greatest of the Western tradition, and everything in between. And even thornier is the music of Hungary’s recent champion of the twentieth century avant garde, Gyorgy Ligety. Ligety drank from the currents running through all of European music after the Second World War, working influentially in both electronic and acoustical media during most of the twentieth century, dying as recently as 2006.
His dense and challenging music was thrust into the public ear due to its inclusion in what is now acknowledged as one of the greatest films of modern times, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey of 1968. Being the eccentric visionary that he is, Kubrick realized his bold concept in the broad, glacial pacing of the film, supported by brilliant cinematography and a keenly compiled classical score. Nowhere else could Strauss (see this post), Strauss (see this post), Khachaturian and Ligeti co-exist as productively as they do in the stunning design of Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece. It is hard to imagine better collaborators in the telling of Kubrick and Clarke’s story than these movements of their exacting selection. 2001 turned the opening of Richard Strauss’ epic tone poem Thus Spake Zarathustra into a household name, and a trope for awe and stunned innovation. The scenes depicting the measured choreography of daily life upon commercial space liners resonate with the Viennese aristocracy, both finding their ideal sonic accompaniment in The Blue Danube. But it is the dense, soupy textures of Ligeti which transport us into the unforgiving prehistoric past and the oppressive vacuum of space, and imagining music better-suited to that task proves difficult.
2001 makes extensive use of three works by Ligeti, Atmospheres for orchestra, Lux Aeterna for choir, and the trembling Kyrie movement of his Requiem (for more about the Requiem, see this post). These different works feature considerable similarities of style, texture, density, and harmony.
All of them capture the vast expanse of space with their breadth and unrelenting thickness. While they are not written for the organ per se, they could very well be transcribed for it, and a similar transcription for the piano would not sit nearly as well. All of the Ligeti works in 2001 draw long, solemn breaths, like the organ. And if 2001 was the only source of Ligeti’s music you ever encountered, you might risk forming an incomplete picture of his oeuvre. The Etudes for piano convey a much different sense, given the idioms permitted by the instrument.
Where Lux Aeterna and Atmospheres are immense, inky, and brooding, the Etudes are light, playful, and intensely rhythmic. Where the Requiem weeps and heaves, the Etudes dance. Where the works featured in 2001 are studies in timbre and ever-shifting polyphony on the smallest level, the Etudes are studies in polyrhythm. Listen to the eighth Etude, subtitled “Metal”, and see if it doesn’t start your body dancing and your mind musing.
This is a completely different side of Ligeti, puckish, alive, charming, and is an essential complement to the ponderous, intensely serious monuments for massive forces that fill the soundtrack of Kubrick’s space opera.
The organ and the piano complement each other perfectly. Where the organ breathes, the piano strikes; where the organ creates thick fog, the piano fills the air with sparkling snow. And where the organ broods, the piano dances. It is important to know the difference, for they each require different sensibilities in creating and performing. From Ligeti, the metallic sheen of the piano drew a manner of musical creativity quite distinct from his brooding orchestral and choral textures which so brilliantly accompanied the cinematography of 2001.
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