ABSTRACT
The compression of history, as accumulated and represented time, acts on the temporal level of a composition to produce an "imaginary time of a higher power". Gyorgy Ligeti does follow Theodor W. Adorno in asserting that musical syntax "is transformed by and through history". The transparent tangle of history is thus the object-cause of desire: it is not simply the inert substance of musical form, but that which causes the subject to desire to at all, and thus that which causes new music to enter the world. In "Metamorphoses of Musical Form", Ligeti identified integral serialism with the "sign of the totally static"; this music "like hanging carpets of mighty oriental quietness" was one culmination of tendencies that dated back to the coda of Ludwig van Beethoven Les adieux Sonata. Ligeti composed Lontano with Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner, and Debussy in mind. Its expanded instrumentation, with four horns and quadruple woodwind, mimics "Bruckner's orchestral effects", and treats the expanded orchestra as a mammoth organ.
