ABSTRACT
During the last years he spent in Budapest, Ligeti was searching for a new path in his composition technique. His unfinished works of this period (such as Istar pokoljárása, 1955, and Fehér és fekete, 1955–6) experiment with clusters and total chromaticism, and show his increasing interest in dodecaphonic technique. Ligeti approached dodecaphony through the Jelinek handbook Anleitung zur Zwölftonkomposition (1952/1958), and wrote critical articles (‘Neues aus Budapest: Zwölftonmusik oder “Neue Tonalität”?’, Melos, 1950) that confirm his involvement in questions of fundamental stylistic choices made in Hungarian music of the 1940s and 1950s. He also began an ambitious project: a book on the music of Anton Webern, modelled on Knud Jeppesen’s monograph on Palestrina (as stated in his correspondence with the musicologist Ove Nordwall).
Once in the West, Ligeti worked continuously on the project for several years, writing papers and delivering radio broadcasts on Webern’s music. In this way, he positioned himself in the core of Webern reception, alongside the most representative composers of the Darmstadt school (Nono, Pousseur and Boulez). His writings and sketches for this project (some still unpublished) reveal a gradual turn from the question of the twelve-tone row and structure to more general dimensions of harmony and orchestration in Webern’s music, a change that can also be observed in Ligeti’s own technique during the 1960s. Based on this unpublished material, ‘From Row to Klang’ will map this important turning phase in Ligeti’s oeuvre.
