Musical Pluralism in the 1960s: Luciano Berio and György Ligeti

29 April 2003
20th Century Music – Professor Milan Slavicky

European music during the two decades after 1945 has been characterized in a variety of ways, especially by its overwhelming pluralism, and the music of the 1960s, in particular, can be seen as a response to the twin trends of serialism, on the one hand, and indeterminacy or aleatoric music, on the other, that developed significantly during the years immediately following after 1945. Serialism, as practiced by figures such as Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928), was rooted in the compositional innovations of Anton Webern (1883–1945) and conceived as a manner of consistently, and objectively, treating all musical elements — pitch, rhythm, dynamics, texture, and even musical form — according to strictly serial procedures, resulting in an complete departure from previous musical assumptions, especially the notion that musical elements are determined by a pre-established set of relationships. Indeterminacy, as described by one of its leading proponents, John Cage (b. 1912), was grounded in two basic principles that, on the surface, clearly distinguish it from serialism. The first of these principles is the idea that music is ultimately an “organization of sound,” with “sound” seen as encompassing all types of noises as well as conventional musical events, while the second is the principle that, according to Cage, “the present methods of writing music, principally those which employ harmony and its reference to particular steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer, who will be faced with the entire field of sound.” 1

In a sense, then, the leading trends of serialism and indeterminacy could be seen to represent a dichotomy in postwar music — the first a rational, largely calculated approach to composition, and the second a more intuitive, non-systematic or non-calculated one — yet both approaches can be seen as using systems that are external to, and arbitrarily imposed upon, the musical materials that they organize, and both approaches can be seen as dissolving musical conventions at the center of the common practice period. The most universal of these conventions are, according to Robert Morgan, “goal-oriented pitch structure,” on the one hand, and “metrically organized rhythm,” 2 on the other. Serialism’s emphasis on mechanical permutations of pitch and the duration of sounds, along indeterminate or aleatoric music’s use of utterly un-mechanical and seemingly unorganized temporal and pitch relationships in indeterminate or aleatoric music, can be seen to have dissolved clear connections between pitches or between rhythms and, in the end, to have destroyed all sense of temporal or metrical structure. Together, serialism and indeterminacy seem to have produced, in Morgan’s words, a “neutralization of musical content,” 3 dissolving melody, counterpoint, harmony, and metrical order into a sort of single, amorphous sound mass.

Especially in the 1960s, a growing pluralism in European music arose out of this legacy of serialism and indeterminacy. It significant to note, moreover, that during this era, more than any other since 1945, freedom of individual expression was considered to be of the highest priority in musical composition, as in so many other art forms. In particular, the compositions of the Italian composer Luciano Berio (b. 1925) and the Hungarian composer György Ligeti (b. 1923) illustrate the pluralistic nature of this legacy, both across the oeuvres of the two composers and within the oeuvre of each composer. Yet both Berio and Ligeti show a strong consideration, typical of the 1960s, for such universal musical attributes — even beyond goal-oriented pitch structure and metrically organized rhythm — as textural density and timbral balance. From early on in his career, Berio had a strong interest in writing music — often highly detailed and allusive — for instruments beyond the conventional large orchestra, including the human voice, with all its unique features, and the electronic medium, for which new, innovative techniques were constantly being developed. Ligeti could be seen as taking the conventional large orchestra, as well as smaller ensembles, as a sort of raw material out of which music might start to be shaped not out of the common method of accumulating many individual musical details — harmonic, rhythmic, or otherwise — but instead more abstractly, through overarching sonic attributes. However, Berio’s work through the 1960s can be seen as a move toward embracing the large orchestra, along with the range of effects that it can produce, as a significant musical medium, even as Ligeti can be seen to have seen the limitations of a music conceived so uncompromisingly around texture, with its tendency to emphasize purely surface effects, and to have moved, in a way, toward the sort of harmonic details that he sought to avoid in his earlier compositions.

I will begin by considering Berio’s a bit of musical background and some of his significant compositions from the late 1950s and 1960s, including Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1958), Laborintus II (1965), and Sinfonia (1968). One of the most important moments in Berio’s early career might be his founding, along with Bruno Maderna (1920–73), of the Studio di Fonologia Musicale at the Radio Audizione Italiane (RAI) broadcast station in Milan in 1955. It was here in Milan that the two leading approaches to electronic music of the time — the Cologne-based electronic approach, using sounds created “purely” through artificial electronic means, and the Paris-based concrete approach, using sounds recorded from the everyday acoustics of the environment — were freely, and simultaneously, accommodated, given Berio’s and Maderna’s notion that method and style were considered matters of personal preference, rather than of ideology. As if to illustrate the eclecticism that reigned in the Milan studio in the late 1950s, three enormously contrasting works were created there between 1957 and 1958, including Berio’s Thema: Omaggio a Joyce, as well as Henri Posseur’s Scambi (1957) and Cage’s Fontana Mix (1958). The unique place of Berio’s Omaggio a Joyce among these three works is shown by the fact that, while Scambi was created from a single electronically generated source — white noise, containing all audible frequencies at the same amplitude or loudness — and provided a completely abstract musical experience, with no familiar musical points of reference, and while Cage’s Fontana Mix united both electronic and concrete methods, ultimately leaving the final realization of the piece completely open-ended and unpredictable, Berio’s work resisted this degree of abstraction. It relied, instead, on painstaking compositional strategies based on the ongoing tension between a familiar element, the human voice, and the remarkable electronic transformations it can undergo. 4 The premise of the work is that a female voice reads from the eleventh chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a recognized work from the literary canon, after which her words are subjected to a wide range of tape manipulations, including montage intercutting, speed and direction change, looping, and tape delay.

Omaggio a Joyce offers a startling range of sonic effects, to be sure, but its real significance seems to lie in illustrating the new dimension that electronic technology can bring to works that unite music, on the one hand, and text, on the other. Berio’s particular interest in this union of music and text was no doubt influenced by the uncanny vocal agility and theatrical intensity of soprano Cathy Berberian (1925–1983), his wife. Highly extroverted, she offered an uninhibited approach to vocal performance — an approach, many have noted, that is rarely witnessed on the nonoperatic stage. She worked to be able to produce the unorthodox and vocally demanding modes of sound production that Berio began to call for in his works, including half-sung words, whispered words, raspy tones, tones without vibrato, singing while inhaling, tongue rolls, tongue clicks, shouting, humming, groaning, gasping, laughing, and coughing. Especially in her ability to make sudden, rapid, and unpredictable shifts between contrasting sounds, at different dynamic levels, she could be seen as transforming vocal performance on the concert stage into a theatrical event.

Laborintus II(1965) was written by Berio as a commission to mark the 700th anniversary of the birth of Dante Alighieri, the famed Florentine poet. Written for a large group of instrumentalists and a small group of vocalists, Laborintus IIis marked, like Omaggio a Joyce, by its turn toward theater and its use of the human voice in an unconventional way. At various times, the three soloists either sing out brightly, combining to create semitone clusters, or shout, or whisper, or hum, or gasp, often juxtaposed against the unsynchronized murmurings of a small background chorus and the episodic interjections of a range of orchestral instruments. The work, lasting 33 minutes, is divided into only two movements, but on the whole, talk of discrete movements does little to capture the spirit of the work; instead, the work is distinguished by “the hazy in-between,” 5 the fluid movement from one segment or situation to another. Furthermore, Laborintus IIis often overwhelmingly propulsive, rather than static, and particularly scattered in its wide range of verbal and musical allusions: to phrases and images from Dante’s Inferno and his Vita Nuova; to idioms — both verbal and musical — particularly significant to Berio; and to verbal and musical elements of Laborintus IIitself, with the text and music serving as running commentaries, each upon the other. It would seem that this wide array of allusions and references might only be possible in a work — such as this one — that has no explicit action, but it has been said that the work, when performed in concert, “tends to sound like an unstaged opera,” 6 as if it has a narrative to project that lies beyond the rather inscrutable observations provided by Berio’s own narrator. Aside from the work’s overwhelmingly allusive character, particularly noteworthy is the opening of the work’s second movement: it quickly takes off like an avant-garde jazz piece, with a space for an improvised double bass solo and wild drumming, but the jazz element — a nod away from the academic avant-garde, toward popular music — soon dissolves into sputterings of tape music clearly inspired by the electronic music techniques pioneered in Germany several years before.

In the Sinfonia (1968), also scored for a large group of instrumentalists and a small group of vocalists, Berio continues to explore the possibilities of manipulating the human voice in unconventional ways and of imbuing a theatrical element to what is ostensibly a concert piece, yet he seems to abandon some of the free-wheeling looseness of Laborintus IIin favor of a more focused, highly structured composition that is, in fact, shorter in length than Laborintus IIbut divided into five discrete movements. Scored for a large orchestra fronted by eight amplified voices, the work, despite its clearly-differentiated movements, retains some of the labyrinthine, multi-layered construction of Laborintus II, nonetheless, given its continuous commentary on, and reference back to, the ideas set up in the first movement. In this first movement, the voices explore the relationship between fragments of text taken from the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Le Cru et le Cuit, a work that analyzes certain Brazilian myths concerning the origins of water, including the recurrent theme of a hero whose trials eventually lead him to death. In the second movement, “O King,” Berio links this myth to what was then the recent murder of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Despite this wide range of verbal and textual allusions, recalling Berio’s strategy in Laborintus II, the most striking musical allusions occur in the third movement of the Sinfonia, in which Berio includes the entirety of the Scherzo movement from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the “Resurrection” Symphony, and treats Mahler’s music as a sort of fragment from an outside world, contrasting with the “frame” of Berio’s own music and a number of repeated words and phrases — the most obvious example being the cry “Keep going!” — that are set around it. This method of musical quotation — in which Mahler’s idiom is not used to shape Berio’s own musical language, or is not translated somehow into Berio’s own idiom, but is, instead, offered verbatim as something foreign, or un-translatable — contravenes the allusive method adopted so memorably by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), in his neo-Baroque Pulcinella suite, or by Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) in his Classical Symphony. It seems, moreover, that the third movement of the Sinfonia has, in its overlap of wildly divergent musical idioms, some equivalent in the opening of the second movement of Laborintus II, with its transition from a free jazz section to electronic tape music. Overall, the Sinfonia can be seen as truly a “sounding together,” as the title suggests, of disparate musical ideas and influences which are synthesized, somehow, to become a vast musical river, sweeping along everything in its wake.

Like Berio, Ligeti had a background in the world of electronic music studios and — as a Hungarian native who fled his country in 1956 — had been known in Western Europe and in America primarily as an associate of Stockhausen’s at the Cologne electronic studio until 1960. However, in his 1960 essay “Metamorphoses of Musical Form,” which appeared in Die Riehe, Ligeti cited examples from Boulez, Stockhausen, and other serialists to show how serial principles had either proved self-defeating — as the serialist interest in small-scale, painstaking details of composition often obscured or ignored the larger whole that was being created — or had been replaced with “higher order” principles, such as those governing the temporal structure of Gruppen. Gruppen was, of course, Stockhausen’s new approach to composition, in the late 1950s, which worked around a number of distinct formal segments, or “groups,” each with its own particular musical characteristics. These musical characteristics governing the various “groups” were determined not by individual features, such as harmonies, specific intervals, or thematic motives, but instead by more generalized attributes, such as textural density, instrumental sonority, average length of durations, and total interval content. 7 In his analysis of serial principles in “Metamorphoses of Musical Form,” Ligeti arrived at the notion of “permeability” in music, in which a musical structure is considered “permeable” if it allows a free choice of intervals and “impermeable” if not. Palestrina’s music, according to Ligeti, would qualify as “impermeable” to a particularly high degree because it is strictly defined by harmonic rules. For Ligeti, moreover, permeability and impermeability could be considered features of texture, rather than harmony: some musical structures will mix with others in a seamless texture, while other structures will stand apart.

With Atmospheres (1961) — for 88-piece orchestra, roughly 9 minutes in length — Ligeti could be seen as putting into practice his analysis of permeability and impermeability, as related to musical texture, given that there is no attempt to treat units of pitch, duration, loudness, and timbre in a serial manner, or in any other systematic way, but instead an attempt to use instruments simply as a source of raw sound from which textures manipulated or layered. His aim — it would seem — was to produce an “atmosphere” out of the comings and goings of sound. To this end, he suspends harmony by the ongoing use of pitch clusters; he eliminates a sense of rhythmic movement by staggering and carefully overlapping the instrumental entries in a manner that he began to call “micropolyphony”; and he emphasizes sustained sounds by omitting the use of percussion instruments. Opening with a fully chromatic cluster covering more than five octaves, held by strings and soft woodwinds, the work continues with the successive falling away of groups of instruments until only violas and cellos are left. However, this small cluster grows again into a much larger one, including the entire ensemble, at which point particular structures, or strands of the sonic fabric, are brought forward: first the strings, then the white notes only, followed by the black notes played by horns, flutes, and clarinets, and finally the strings once again, as the sound dies away. This series of waves, of crescendos and decrescendos, is mirrored throughout the piece by shifts from one timbre to another, and by shifts between long and short note values. These shifts in the temporal duration of sounds help to drive the work forcefully onward at points, as if in a frenzy, not unlike the forward-churning motion of Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231 dating from almost four decades before. Ligeti’s interest in creating striking sonic textures is borne out, moreover, in his stipulation that many of the instrumentalists in the ensemble simultaneously use nonstandard playing techniques on their respective instruments.

It is interesting to note that Ligeti’s strong interest in creating musical texture, evidenced particularly in Atmospheres, can be seen as related not only to Stockhausen’s Gruppen methods, but also to the work, during the early 1960s, of composers, such as Witold Lutoslawski, who accommodated aleatoric techniques in search of textural effects that could involve multiple, yet uncoordinated, layers of rhythmic activity. About his own use of aleatoric, or indeterminate, techniques, Lutoslawski wrote that “[t]he point at issue is not a matter of differences between one performance and another [as it might have been for Cage or for Stockhausen]. . . . I did not intend, either, to free myself of part of my responsibility for the work by transferring it to the players. The purpose of my endeavors was solely a particular result in sound.” 8 Ligeti seems to share something of Lutoslawski’s interest in incorporating indeterminacy, or aleatoric techniques — the free repetition of a four-note pattern in Atmospheres, for example — for a sonic result, rather than for the sake of novelty. For Ligeti, blocks or masses of sound were seen as serving just as well as chords, or individual notes, in shaping a musical discourse, since a “sound mass” — liberated from being heard in terms of specific pitches or chords — can be manipulated with respect to rhythm, register, timbre, dynamics, and other variables, but can also be manipulated in terms of “weight” or “density,” and in terms of the relative complexity of its surface. Therefore, the individual lines of music in sound-mass textures — in a work like Atmospheres, at least — are intended as indistinguishable parts of a larger fabric.

The sonic fabric that Ligeti was seeking to create grew more complex, albeit with fewer instrumental resources, in Aventures (1962), a work scored for three singers and seven instrumentalists. This work introduces speech, with theatrical possibility that speech inevitably brings, in a manner that recalls, in a way, Berio’s Omaggio a Joyce — given that work’s unexpected electronic transformations of the human voice — yet Aventures relies not on electronic manipulations, but on Ligeti’s own decision to “compose” sort of nonsense phonetic syllables and exclamations, or “words,” which cannot be found in any language. The words succeed, however, in evoking a range of human emotions and responses, including — to use Ligeti’s own words — “understanding and dissension, dominion and subjection, honesty and deceit, arrogance disobedience.” The “words” spoken by the three singers — each of whom has five roles to play, exploring five areas of emotion — are punctuated dramatically by the often short, crisp interjections of instrumentalists, creating a lively interchange that conveys the vicissitudes of the five personalities that Ligeti presents. With Aventures, Ligeti seems to have widened his interests to include not only the abstract language of sounds found in the texture-driven Atmospheres — which might be considered a sonic narrative of its own, or an accompaniment to some other imagined, or implied, narrative sequence — but also the verbal element of “words,” combined with an abstract sonic language, that can create a convincing performance and offer meaningful narrative content. Nevertheless, one critic has said that the expressiveness of the work — what Ligeti called the “wild gesticulating” of the singers and instrumentalists — is ultimately impersonal, or kept at a safe distance from the listener, “as if we [the listeners] were viewing a display of blazing and naked emotions through a pane of glass, or a sheet of ice.” 9 It is, perhaps, this perceived detachment in Aventures — a work intended, it would seem, as a series of rather visceral “adventures” in form and expression — that may have inspired the many attempts to stage the work fully, complete with set and props, even though Ligeti is said to have conceived the work as a piece for chamber musicians to perform in the concert hall, not in the theater.

In the mid-1960s, as Berio’s Laborintus II invested the spoken language of singers with a more recognizable, clearly allusive content, Ligeti can be seen to have moved, in some way, from work involving the theatrical use of spoken language toward a sort of reappraisal of his texture-driven music. An element of this reappraisal can be found, at least in part, in his Lux Aeterna (1966) for 16-part unaccompanied chorus, a setting of a Latin text from the Mass for the Dead and a sort of complement to his Requiem, for two soloists, two choruses, and orchestra, of the previous year. While the work is rather minor when compared to the wide range of Ligeti’s output during the 1960s, it is often seen as a turning point in the composer’s career because it is seen as confirming a tendency already event in the “Lacrimosa” of his Requiem — that is, of course, the re-emergence of harmony in his work. While Lux aeterna certainly features harmonically-ambiguous, texture-driven effects — including sonorities that involve clouds of slowly-evolving semitone clusters — it also shares something of the more harmonically-oriented, contrapuntally-based spirit of earlier choral works, such as the “Sanctus” from Stravinsky’s Mass, with its juxtaposition of long, high sustained notes in the upper voices and rich, dense, forward-moving lines in the lower voices. It is interesting to note that, early in his career, Ligeti was a teacher of counterpoint, and that for him, there was undeniably a link — a contrapuntal link, even, if counterpoint is understood broadly as the integration of distinct voices, or strands of sonority, into a larger sonic whole — between his work in the electronic studios in Cologne, his texture-driven compositions of the early 1960s, such as Atmospheres, and his more conventionally harmonic works later in the decade. In Ligeti’s own mind, it seems that “superimpos[ing] layers of recorded sound,” 10 as Ligeti described his work in Cologne, was nonetheless related to his manipulation of sonic texture — through permeable and impermeable strands, or layers, of sound — in such works as Atmospheres, and also with his return, in Lux aeterna, to the sort of harmonic hierarchy in which counterpoint, in its narrowest sense, can have meaning.

In 1967 — the year following the composition of Lux aeterna — Ligeti returned to writing for large orchestra with Lontano. In this work, roughly 13 minutes in length, Ligeti continues to explore the possibilities of musical texture even as it embraces a more obviously harmonic palette. The individual lines are less like mere particles in a sound mass and more like distinct voices, many in number, which are carefully interwoven into a dense fabric. Like Atmospheres, the work begins quietly and ends with a prolonged fade, as if it arrives from far away — da lontano — and slowly departs, but unlike Atmospheres, with that work’s strong emphasis on the surface effects of texture, there is in Lontano a greater sense of space or distance, of a significant sonic dimension below the surface. This sort of sonic distance, or depth, is especially noticeable in the way that the simultaneous sounding of very high and very low notes in the work suggests a high vertical extension, as well as in Ligeti’s careful attention to the way that the layout of the orchestra — giving the brass more presence than the strings, for example — can affect the “space” in which the listener perceives sounds. The element of distance implied by the work’s title can be seen not only in the spatial realm, but also in the realms of memory, or of history, given that Ligeti himself considered the work as alluding to the far-off “dream worlds of late Romantic music.” 11 In a passage near the end of Lontano, for example, the soft, lush entrance of the horns was seen by Ligeti as a sort of recollection, or emulation, of the coda closing the slow movement of Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony.

In the end, it seems significant that, at the close of a decade as tumultuous and multifaceted as the 1960s, both Berio, in his Sinfonia, and Ligeti, in his Lontano, seem to challenge the formal conventions of musical and to incorporate the ongoing interest in discontinuity — seen more and more since 1945 as a legitimate sort of musical fabric — even as they seem to turn more and more away from the purity of academic avant-gardisms, including the interest in the amorphous sound mass that Morgan has seen as a “neutralization of musical content,” in favor of references to their own musical roots, or to music’s collective historical memory, in the form of classical Western art music.

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1 John Cage, in Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1991), pp. 359-360.
2 Morgan, p. 380
3 Ibid., p. 381.
4 Elliott Schwartz and Daniel Godfrey, Music Since 1945: Issues, Materials, and Literature (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), pp. 115-116.
5 Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 176.
6 Ibid.
7 Morgan, p. 381.
8 Witold Lutoslawski, in Morgan, pp. 375-376.
9 Stephen Plaistow, in the liner notes to the Deutsche Grammophon recording 423 244-2 of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, Ramifications, String Quartet No. 2, Aventures, and Lux aeterna.
10 György Ligeti, in Plaistow.
11 Paul Griffiths, in the liner notes to Deutsche Grammophon recording 429 260-2 of the Wiener Philharmoniker playing Wolfgang Rihm’s Depart, Ligeti’s Atmospheres and Lontano, Luigi Nono’s Liebeslied, and Pierre Boulez’s Notations I-IV.