THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

challenges–particularly that of analyzing electroacoustic music–that may have prevented
more widespread scholarly attention.
Review of Critical Literature
With these compelling reasons to suspect connections between the electronic and
orchestral pieces of Ligeti’s post-Hungarian period, it is curious that there are not more
studies on the electronic works; while many authors comment briefly on these works,
there are almost no serious analytical studies of Glissandi and Artikulation. Most
biographies or general works on Ligeti devote a paragraph, or at most a few scant pages
to these works, and most often these sources focus on the associations evoked by the
musical surface rather than any underlying techniques or methods of construction.
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Constantin Floros and Wolfgang Burde acknowledge that this period was highly
influential in his acquisition of knowledge of serialism and psychoacoustics. However,
neither author mentions details of the pieces themselves or how this knowledge might
manifest itself in Ligeti’s compositional work.
Richard Steinitz comments that, “characteristically, Ligeti focused on the
communicative potential of synthesized sound as a quasi-language–evoking associations,
images and implications... These extra-musical inferences are apparent in his first
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electronic work, Glissandi composed in 1957.” Steinitz goes on to characterize
Artikulation as “a compendium of quasi-vocal mannerisms compressed into less than four
6Constantin
Floros, György Ligeti: Jenseits von Avantgarde und Postmoderne (Vienna: Verlag Lafite,
1996) and Wolfgang Burde, György Ligeti: eine Monographie (Zurich: Atlantis Musikbuch, 1993).
7Steinitz,
Music of the Imagination, 79.
5