THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

One may note the similarity in these early works’ titles, “Dark and Light” and the
choral pair, “Night” and “Morning;” moreover, each piece uses cluster-like material in
stark contrast to express the first part of this opposition. The emphasis in these pieces is
on binary contrast, not on a sense of developing internal motion within these clusters, yet
considering the role of micro-polyphony to create clusters in Ligeti’s later music–and
particularly in Atmosphères–one cannot ignore this humble precedent.
Some aspects of Ligeti’s use of clusters is undoubtably influenced by Karlheinz
Stockhausen–particularly the techniques he used when composing his two electronic
studies (1953-54). These were the pieces in which Stockhausen made his first attempts to
use exclusively sine tones as his pitch material, and many similarities can be seen between
the way he handles these sine-tones and the way Ligeti handles the individual pitches of his
tone-clusters.
In his Studie II, Stockhausen defines a scale where each note is 255, or
approximately 1.066495 times the previous; a standard semitone is slightly smaller than
this, approximately 1.059 in equal temperament. From this field of available pitches chose
5 different types of note-mixtures: sounds which are made of 5 consecutive notes from
this scale, sounds which use every other note in the scale, every third note, and so forth.
Each note-mixture uses 5 sine-tones in one of these combinations. Since the number of
pitches is constant, the width of the chords will correspond inversely to their density, but
the individual tones will always be evenly spaced within the whole, and thus there will be
five discrete types of note-mixture defined by spacing and width.
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