ABSTRACT
György Ligeti first visited San Francisco during his stay at Stanford University, where he lectured for about six months in 1972. He was acquainted at this time with American minimalist music and with the prints of Maurits Cornelis Escher, and realized that his own art shared deep similarities with theirs. Ligeti saw copies of Escher’s pictures in the laboratories at Stanford, and was fascinated by Escher’s ‘pattern transformations’. Like Escher, Ligeti had experimented with acoustic illusion in which a sound pattern gradually transforms into a different kind of pattern, as in his famous minimalistic work Continuum (1968). This ‘pattern transformation’ plays an important role in San Francisco Polyphony (1973–4).
This chapter attempts to reconstruct the chronology of primary source materials for San Francisco Polyphony, showing how Ligeti drew the fog’s metamorphosis in sound and clarifying the compositional techniques used to create the fog-like cluster and the ‘American meccanico’ section. Ligeti drew imaginative drawings, but he controlled chaotic tone-clusters by constantly checking the control and model sketches. The opening tone-cluster contains various descending melodies, which are indiscernible because they are arranged in the form of intertwined creeping lines. A clear melody emerges on the surface, but gradually sinks. The cluster represents a dense and soft ‘water world’, while multilayered structures based on different speed patterns are woven together to form a complex web similar to Reich’s Drumming. Moreover, heterophonic melodies overlap one another. The impressive melody reminded him of the atmosphere of Vienna, while the rapid heterophonic patterns reminded him of America.
