| Description |
Dissatisfied with what he felt was the too-academic avant-garde in the early 1980s, György Ligeti worked to create a new personal style of composition that combined cutting-edge formal techniques with more traditional harmonic/melodic material. The product of this effort was the Horn Trio, written in 1982. This work is noted as much for its musical heritage in Brahms and Beethoven as it is for its departures from that tradition. The Horn Trio marks a general turning-away from his previous sound-mass focused compositions to a more clearly defined harmonic/melodic style. Ligeti's combination of the new and the old can be viewed especially clearly in the work's finale: Lamento. Some elements that are retained from Ligeti's previous style include exhaustion/saturation of range and texture, and juxtaposition of extremes-high against low, loud against soft, thick against thin, and other similar contrasts. Ligeti's new influences in this movement are quite traditional: passacaglia and lament. However, the ways in which he develops and expands these two elements are unorthodox. They are stripped of their conventional applications and elaborated to the point of exhaustion. Other elements that play an increasingly important role in Ligeti's later compositions are also explored. Influences like nonstandard tunings, fractals, Shepard Scales, and M.C. Escher drawings are applied in this movement, some for the first time in Ligeti's output. iv Ligeti's creative energy in the Lamento movement is focused on using small gestures to foreshadow and create large-scale structures and patterns. The movement's initial presentation of the passacaglia foreshadows nearly every other subsequent musical event. Because of this, the Schoenbergian concepts of Grundgestalt and developing variation are very helpful to understanding and describing the music. Because the passacaglia and lament are so ingrained into the fabric of the music, the piece maintains a strong sense of coherence and unity despite the continuous development of each of these elements. As a result, Ligeti is able to create an aesthetically pleasing and intellectually stimulating piece of music that contains elements of both the avant-garde and older musical tradition, but that strictly conforms to neither and is entirely unique. |
