Gyorgy Ligeti / Bernd Alois Zimmermann - Music for two Pianos (1980)

Gyorgy Ligeti was born 89 years ago today, in 1923. He lived to the age of 83, passing away in 2006.

Notes excerpted from the (enclosed) insert:
 
Monument, Selbstportrait, Bewegung- Ligeti's first piano composition since his emigration in 1956, was commissioned by the West German Radio; it was written during February, March, and April 1976, and received its world premiere at Cologne on the 15th of May 1976.

Monument - music which with its unvarying character and momentum seems to mark time on the spot - or, as the title suggests, on its pedestal. Regularly recurring intervals, only occasionally increased or reduced, are associated with particular gradings of volume level. While the pitch layers gradually extend upward and downward from the middle register, the fortissimo blocks of sound at the beginning evolve into an ever more complex texture of different dynamic levels which exist simultaneously, drawing the ear from the forte in the foreground by way of mezzo-forte, mezzo-piano and piano levels to the depths of pianissimo.
"If the dynamic differentiation is realized accurately, the music produces the effect of being three-dimensional, like a hologram standing in an imaginary space. This illusion of space gives the music a statuesque, immobile character (=Monument)."

Selbstportrait - "Self Portrait with Reich and Riley (and with Chopin in the Background)" is in the tradition of the pieces of Ligeti which by means of the polyrhythmic superimposing of extremely intricate kinds of figuration conjure up musical puzzles of outrageous absurdity )Poeme Symphonique for 100 metronomes, 1962, Les Horloges Demoniaques from Nouvelle Aventures,  1965,  Continuum for harpsichord and the 2nd String Quartet, 1968. Similar methods, although within entirely different formal concepts, were also developed during the sixties in the music of the American "minimalists"  La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Ligeti's musical group picture - drawn sharply and with a hint of caricature - clearly  reveals both relationships and differences. "As hommage to Riley and Reich (while personal affection certainly also played a part) I gave it a touch of irony (and no less self-irony, as I also depicted myself), combining the techniques of Riley's pattern repetition and Reich's phase shifting with my own techniques of superimposed grids and supersaturated canons"(...)

Even more pianistic in effect is "In a gently flowing movement", a hair-raisingly difficult study in velocity demanding the utmost virtuosity, in which characteristics of traditional piano music (Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Debussy) glimmer like recollected images. This third third movement is, at the same time, a pendant to the first, a "liquified" variant of the static "Monument", and its chorale-like closing section - an eight-voice mirror canon "which constantly draws closer together like a telescope" sums up the concluding character of all three pieces in a joint epilogue.

Perspektiven, Monologue- Key works Of Zimmermann's oeuvre during the fifties and sixties. The Perspektiven, which form what is probably his forst strictly structural piece, reflect his coming to grips with late Webern, with the technique of serial composition, it is no mere chance that the second part of this work contains, like a deeply respectful evocation, an allusion to Webern's Concerto Op.24.
It is typical of Zimmermann that from strict construction he was able to create music of a sensuous character, marked by richness of tone colours, espressivo, apparently improvisatory freedom and pianistic brilliance. Perspektiven I was completed in April 1955 and Perspektiven II about a year later.

Zimmermann produced Monologe-a solo version of the Dialoge for two pianos and full orchestra- at the beginning of 1964 during his second year of study at the Villa Massimo in Rome. With the Dialoge (1960) and the piano trio Presence  (1961). The Monologe forms a kind of triptych; all three compositions correspond to each other formally and are derived from the same symmetrical all-interval row; indeed, all three are  founded, down to details of note sequences, rhythmical and dynamic articulation, on almost identical structures. Zimmermann's concept of "pluralistic sound"- from the time of his opera "Die Soldaten" (1958-60) the dominant principle of his musical thinking and composing- is realized in Monologe perhaps even more clearly and comprehensively than in the  two sister works. 

Materials of the past and of the present, personal to the composer and borrowed from elsewhere, are subtly interwoven in a "broad texture of musical elements of time an experience". This pluralistic composing introduces skillfully fashioned collages of quotations: Bach, Messiaen, Debussy, Beethoven, Mozart, Gregorian Chant and Boogie-Woogie are recognizable- alienating, colouring and commenting on Zimmermann's train of thought. Spontaneity, eloquence and virtuosity schooled on earlier models - above all Liszt and Debussy - give this quasi-surrealistic world of dreams and associations an extremely telling actuality.

Side One:
 
a1-3: Gyorgy Ligeti-Three Pieces For Two Pianos

I-Monument (4:07)
II-Self-Portrait (With Reich And Riley And With Chopin In The Background) (7:03)
III-Movement (4:52)

a4: Bernd Alois Zimmermann-Perspektiven I (8:04)
Side Two

b1: Bernd Alois Zimmermann-Perspecktiven II (5:10)

b2: Bernd Alois Zimmermann-Monologue For Two Pianos (18:02)

Alois and Alfons Kontarsky-Pianos

(1)  or  (1)  or  (1)

Structures for Two Pianos

Pierre Boulez - Structures for Two Pianos

Let's get this show back on the road. I meant to have a new post up on either Tuesday or Wednesday. The cord on my AC adaptor broke while I was visiting family and I used up all of the battery on my laptop which is actually my only computer. I didn't have access to my laptop for the past few days until I made it back home where I have a backup AC adaptor.

Performers: Alfons Kontarsky and Aloys Kontarsky

From the liner notes by Tom Carlson:

Dating from 1955, the Structures are revealed upon close examination as a very logical yet complex arrangement of the materials used. In selecting his material, Boulez arranges the tone row to form a quotation from Messiaen's "Mode de valeurs et d'intensites." This passage is notable for its lack of intervals below six; however, in its inversion, it contains only intervals below seven, and the interworking of the two lines against each other gives the work its initial propulsion. To some degree, the working of musical values might well have been determined by computer, but this is true only up to a point, after which the composer must select a direction for the music to take. The notes used, their duration and dynamics are the result of serial technique, plus pre-determined tables to indicate their interaction. The composer has chosen to use all transpositions of his notes in their original form, inversion, cancrizan and inverted cancrizan, each used only once. Again, these are played with or against the previously determined dynamic shadings and time values. Beginning with the Messiaen quotation, the work is essentially "creatio ex everything," considering the wide variety of technical permutation used in the constructon of the work, and the composer's selection of various treatments to which it is subjected.

Tracklisting:

Side A

1. band 1 {3:22}

2. band 2 {8:26}

3. band 3 {2:10}

Side B

1. band 1 {8:26}

2. band 2 {10:32}

(1)

Mantra

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Mantra

Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky - piano

The formal plan and skeleton of MANTRA for 2 pianists came into being between May 1st and June 20th 1970, in Osaka, Japan. Every morning I composed for ca. 3 hours in my hotel room, before driving at midday to the spherical auditorium at the World Exhibition where, together with 20 young singers and instrumentalists, I performed my music daily from 3:30 p.m. to ca. 9:00 p.m., for over 1 million listeners. Then, from July 10th to August 18th, I worked uninterrupted on the score in Kürten, and on October 18th at 8:30 p.m. the work was premiered by the pianists Aloys and Alfons Kontarsky at the "Donaueschinger Musiktage für Zeitgenössische Tonkunst", as a commission from the Südwestfunk Baden-Baden. The gramophone recording for Deutsche Grammophon took place from the 10th to the 13th June 1971 at Munich, in the recording studio at 22 Kreillerstrasse.

The work arises in its entirety from a 13-note sound-formula, the "Mantra". For the title-cover of the record, I have drawn this "Mantra" in colour. The colours show the structural relationships of the "Mantra" (upper voice) with its mirror image (lower voice); with its 4 limbs - separated by pauses; with its 13 different characteristics which are given by its 13 notes, and each of which determines a large cycle of the work: 1. regular repetition; 2. decay-accent; 3. "normal" note; 4. quick grace-note group around the central note etc.

There is nothing except continual series of this "Mantra" and superimpositions of it over itself, in 12 forms of expansion and 13 x 12 transpositions. That is, in each of the 13 large cycles - in each of which a note from the "Mantra" is itself the central note around which the expanded forms arise - another of the 13 mantric characteristics predominates.
MANTRA, therefore, is not a variation form. The "Mantra" is not varied; not a single note is added, nothing is "accompanied", ornamented etc. The "Mantra" always stays itself, and appears in its twelvefoldness, with its 13 characteristics.
The fast passage before the end is a compression of the whole work into the shortest space of time; all expansions and transpositions are gathered extremely fast into 4 layers.
So-called "ring-modulation", which I have employed as a technical process, makes possible a new system of harmonic relationships. To this end, each of the pianists has an apparatus on his left hand side into which a microphone amplifier, a compressor, a filter, a ring-modulator, a scaled sine-wave generator, and a volume control have been built. The piano sound is amplified by 2 microphones, and ring-modulated by a sine wave. At some distance behind each piano stand loudspeakers which reproduce the modulated sound simultaneously with the played sound. The modulated sound should be somewhat louder than the original sound.
In each of the 13 large cycles of the work, each pianist introduces a sine tone, corresponding each time to the central note around which all the "Mantra"-transformations are centred. The 1st pianist presents the "upper" 13 notes of the "Mantra" in succession, and the 2nd pianist the "lower" 13 notes, that is, the "Mantra"- mirror.
Each 1st and 13th note of each recurrence of the "Mantra" are thus identical to the "mirroring" sine tone; hence they sound completely "consonant", and thus completely "natural"-like notes; and depending on the intervallic remoteness of the remaining "Mantra" notes from the "mirror note" of the ring modulation, the modulated sound sounds more or less "dissonant", and its spectrum more or less unlike the piano (minor seconds, and similarly minor ninths and major sevenths, produce the most "dissonant" modulator-sounds, octaves and fifths the most "consonant"). Hence one perceives a continual "respiration" from consonant to dissonant to consonant modulator-sounds, resulting from the precisely tuned relationships between the modulating sine tones and the modulated piano notes.
Naturally, the unified construction of MANTRA is a musical miniature of the unified macrostructure of the cosmos, just as it is a magnification into the acoustic time-field of the unified micro-structure of the harmonic vibrations in notes themselves. (Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kürten, September 15th, 1971)


Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Mantra (1. Teil) {34:56}

Side 2

1. Mantra (2. Teil) {29:40}

(1)

Zyklus/Refrain/Transición II

Karlheinz Stockhausen/Mauricio Kagel - split release [S/8001]

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Zyklus (1959) for one percussionist

Performed by Christoph Caskel - marimbaphone, guiro, two wood drums, African tree drums, suspended Indian bells, side drum, four tom-toms, two cymbals, high hat, two triangles, vibraphone, four cowbells, gong, tam-tam, soft and hard sticks of different materials

In ZYKLUS the primarily static, open form of my KLAVIERSTUCK XI - which literally depends on the "Augenblick," the instantaneous glance of the eye - has been combined with the idea of a dynamic, closed form, resulting in a circular, curved form. Sixteen pages of notation have been spiral-bound to one another, side by side; there is no beginning and no end; the player may start on whichever page he pleases, but he then must play a cycle in the given succession. During the performance the player stands in the center of a circle of percussion instruments and turns, from one playing position to another, once around his own axis, clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on the direction in which he has chosen to read.

Areas containing dots and groups of notes and symbols vary from one another through differences in the number of possible combinations; they mediate continuously, in their composed succession, between the entirely unequivocal and the extremely ambiguous. The structure with the greatest indeterminateness - the most ambiguous form - is shaped in such a way that it comes to be almost indistinguishable from the immediately following most firmly fixed structure.

Thus one experiences a temporal circle in which one has the impression of moving constantly in the direction toward ever-increasing ambiguousness (clockwise) or certainty (counterclockwise), although at the critical point at which the extremes touch, one of them imperceptibly turns into the other. The purpose is to close the open form through the circle, to realize the static state within the dynamic, the aimless with the aimed, not to exclude or destroy one aspect or another, not to seek a synthesis in a third state, but rather to attempt again to eliminate the dualism and to mediate between the seemingly incompatible, the utterly different. (Karlheinz Stockhausen)

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Refrain (1959) for three performers

Performed by Aloys Kontarsky - piano wood blocks; Bernhard Kontarsky - celeste, antique cymbals; Christoph Caskel - vibraphone, cowbells, glockenspiel

Those who wish to understand what I have written for the three players in REFRAIN must read the score.

Those who wish to understand how the players interpret my score must know the score and compare performances.

Those who simply wish to hear (not understand) a piece of music need only listen.

What is left to be explained?

(Karlheinz Stockhausen)

Mauricio Kagel - Transición II (1959) for piano, percussion and two magnetic tapes

Performed by David Tudor - piano; Christoph Caskel - percussion

"Transición II" already has been posted not too long ago by H.C. Earwicker on his Kagel tribute compilation. However, as this is also performed by the same musicians, this is a different performance as this version is about three minutes longer than the one H.C. included in his post. I hope that he doesn't mind if I post this version here.

side 1

1. Karlheinz Stockhausen - Zyklus {11:41}

2. Karlheinz Stockhausen - Refrain {8:04}

side 2

1. Mauricio Kagel - Transición II {17:25}

(1)