OVERVIEW

In my vocal or vocal-instrumental compositions Aventures and Nouvelles aventures, I have used an artificial language. Such a made-up language serves as a kind of wrapping that contains real language at its core. All human affects, turned into rituals by conventional social behaviour such as agreement or disagreement, dominance or submission, honesty or lie, arrogance, disobedience, even the merest hints of irony hiding behind apparent consent or, indeed, admiration hiding behind apparent contempt – all of that, and more, can be precisely expressed in an asemantic, emotional artificial language. The „text“, given in phonetic alphabet, had not been there before the music; rather, both took form at the same time, meaning that the text itself is music, a composition made purely of speech sounds. This „speech sound composition“ is based on imagined relationships between different modes of affective behaviour, not on an abstract blueprint. Technically speaking, there is a phonetic system of grouped speech sounds and their changes that plays a role when the piece is performed, but these are primarily chosen according to their capacity of evoking emotions in a form that is akin to speech. The composition, therefore, does not „set text to music“ in the conventional sense. Rather, it can be said that music mediates the text and vice versa. Music does not provide „accompaniment“ to the vocal element. The instrumental parts are written so as to flesh out or underline the speech sounds: we see phonetic composition affecting the very realm of instrumental music. This heightened emotionality, along with body language and facial expressions that stem from it, can steer, despite its pure musicality, close to imaginary stage action as defined through affect rather than content. Listening, we experience an „opera“ of sorts, with adventurous episodes undergone by imaginary characters on an imaginary stage. That is to say that our experience is opposite to our previous experience of opera: the stage and protagonists are evoked by music in the first place. This is not a score created for an opera; the „opera“ takes place inside the music itself.

György Ligeti

György Ligeti (1923–2006) holds a special position among the European composers of the latter half of the 20th century due to the diversity of his work, which might be deeply rooted in tradition but at the same time shows new possibilities in its development. Born in Hungarian (now Romanian) Transylvania, he was strongly influenced by Béla Bartók in his youth, and through him also by Hungarian folk music. Already at that time, Ligeti’s musical visions were original; however, under the given conditions, he could not fully realize them. He had the opportunity to become more familiar with the current trends of the avant-garde only after 1956, when he fled to Austria and then
to Germany. Even though he became part of the then-progressive circles in
the West, he always kept a certain distance from them. In the 1960s his compositions Apparitions, Atmosphères, Requiem, Lux aeterna, and Lontano, in which densely interwoven voices of individual instruments merge into a unified stream of sound, caused a sensation. Nevertheless, Ligeti had never frozen in one style; on the contrary, in each composition he created a new world, trying new compositional procedures, always giving precedence to the resulting sound over strict methods. In his oeuvre he absorbed the most varying influences but always managed to transform them into a distinctive musical language.