Music: Any readers who are unaware of just who György Ligeti is have only to think of the celestial vocal music in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the ominous two-note piano motif which occurs at the moments of greatest tension in Eyes Wide Shut. We are speaking of one of the most original minds in 20th-century music, who turned 80 in May, writes Fergus Johnston.
During his long career, Ligeti has refused to follow any slavish doctrine save that of independent inquiry, his compositional approach in pieces such as Apparitions (1959) being celebrated as an alternative to the rigid systems of total serialism which were de rigueur during the 1950s. The same inquisitive thinking subsequently had the composer criticised for having capitulated to tradition with pieces like the Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano (1982). It was no capitulation, we learn, merely a reappraisal of previous thought: "The Horn Trio was a calculated counterblast . . . issued in the belief that every radical stance ossifies, and that true originality proceeds not forwards, but sideways, or zigzag, or even in reverse."
The author, Richard Steinitz, can speak with authority: he is the Professor of Music at the University of Huddersfield, and a composer, and he also wears the hat of artistic director of the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music, probably the most important event of its type in these islands and one of the most important in Europe.
Steinitz writes in the introduction that his approach to documenting Ligeti's work didn't start out as a biography, but became one. Much of the material is derived from conversations the author had with the composer in Hamburg during 2000, and consequently there is much in the book about Ligeti's life that is new and revealing, some of it tragic (the death of his father and the murder of his brother), some hilarious (his "Chaplinesque" escapes from the Soviets when on the march to be used as slave labour after the second World War). His escape to the West is recounted for the first time, and the heady atmosphere he found himself in when in Germany is engagingly recounted. Imagine knocking on Stockhausen's front door and having it opened by Bruno Maderna!
To use an analogy, it would be like calling to see Mohammed and having the door opened by Buddha.
But this book is more than a biography, for it applies itself to discussions of a more aesthetic nature. It demonstrates in marvellous detail the rigour with which Ligeti applied himself to the complexities of his work. The Piano Concerto, for example, was begun 21 times (the sketches are available for perusal in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basle, Switzerland). It also presents analysis of Ligeti's music in an elegant style which uses imagery to great effect. Writing of the appearance of something as common or garden as a dominant seventh chord on F in the first movement of the Double Concerto for Flute and Oboe, a piece from 1972, Steinitz gives us:
Not only is Ligeti's partial rehabilitation of a clichéd chord the foundation from which flows the remainder of the movement; its half-concealed warmth, below the twisting micro-tonal clusters of solo oboe and wind, is strangely tantalising, lingering in the mind's ear well after the chord itself has vanished, like the bloom of a perfect complexion glimpsed in a crowd.
Or when writing of Clocks and Clouds (1973), he gives us the profoundly simple statement: "For music to glide smoothly between clockiness to cloudiness it must be liquid."
Any writer who can explain complex musical effects to a not-necessarily- musically-educated readership using such explicit language and imagery has a head start on others.
The analysis itself is clearly articulated and is a helpful guide to the mechanisms and processes which Ligeti uses in his oeuvre. There is also a glossary of terms, which will be necessary even for the initiated: aksak, for example, is a new term to me, but is a Turkish one, coined by a Romanian ethno-musicologist, and is Ligeti's approved word to describe the limping rhythms he borrows from Balkan music. (Although, since the Balkans are no longer under Ottoman control, the Slavic neravnodelno would be more politically correct, if harder to pronounce!)
But what comes across most strongly is the sparkling personality of Ligeti, his sense of humour, his irrepressibly inquisitive mind, and his love of Lewis Carroll's Alice.
This book is riveting, informative and enjoyable, and, I think, probably the best yet written about its subject, whose music has so enchanted and mesmerised aficionados of 20th-century music. Buy it.
Fergus Johnston is a composer and a visiting lecturer in the music technology department of TCD
György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination. By Richard Steinitz, Faber and Faber, 429pp, £25