Levy 1

Ligeti’s Distant Resonances with Spectralism

Benjamin Levy

Abstract:

This chapter examines the relationships between György Ligeti and spectralism, both in terms of

a similar repertoire of compositional techniques (including the use of interpolations, difference

tones, and instrumental synthesis) and in terms of a more general aesthetic outlook or attitude.

Many spectralists, including Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Horaţiu Rădulescu, Kaija Saariaho,

and Claude Vivier, have acknowledged varying degrees of influence from or respect for Ligeti,

but also take care to differentiate their own works from his precedent. Conversely, in his later

career, Ligeti found ways of expressing both admiration for and independence from spectralism.

A comparative examination of these composers’ prose writings and musical compositions

reveals some connections that are deeper, and others which are more superficial. Moreover,

looking at these composers’ statements in their historical context can illuminate the political,

artistic, and pragmatic reasons for their rhetorical positions. In the end, the ways in which both

Ligeti and the spectral composers responded to ideas of “distance”—in the acoustic imitation of

echoes and reverberations, but also the experience of geographical, cultural, and emotional

distances common to their historical moment—form their most enduring connections.

Keywords: György Ligeti, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Horaţiu Rădulescu, Kaija Saariaho,

Claude Vivier, distance, interpolation, difference tones, instrumental synthesis

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Positioning Ligeti and Spectralism

György Ligeti has often been seen as a forerunner to spectralism and an influence on composers

including Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Horaţiu Rădulescu, Kaija Saariaho, and Claude Vivier,

to mention only a few. Ligeti figures into comments that these composers have made about their

influences and aesthetics, and similarly, Ligeti’s writings about his own works seem to resonate

with foundational ideas in this movement. Blurring the lines between harmony and timbre,

emphasizing gradual transformations of material, and delving into the inner workings of sound—

all of these are characteristic of both Ligeti and the composers associated with the spectral school

and are at the source of many of their connections. For Grisey, the sense of dilated time found in

works like Lontano and Clocks and Clouds elevated Ligeti into the holy trinity of influential

predecessors—the holy spirit, next to Messiaen the father, and Stockhausen, the son. 1 Pierre-

Albert Castenet refers to him as one of the “three ‘ees’” along with Claude Debussy and Giacinto

Scelsi;2 and Julian Anderson, in his “A Provisional History of Spectral Music,” makes the claim

for the extended reach of his influence, saying that Ligeti’s “preoccupation with slow rates of

change and dense, continuously evolving textures… had an obvious effect not merely on Grisey

and Murail but later on the music of Kaija Saariaho as well.” 3

Ligeti and the spectral composers operated in a shared compositional space bounded by

what can be seen as three common artistic orientations: formative experiences with electronic

music (and through these a greater appreciation of acoustics), the desire to set themselves apart

from integral serialism, and, more broadly, a strong interest in musical systems that fall outside

the Western classical tradition. Triangulating between these electroacoustic, post-serial, and non-

Western influences, it is not surprising that they share certain features. By looking at comments

these composers have made about each other and through the comparative analysis of some of
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their respective works, this chapter looks at the basis for the connection between Ligeti and

spectralism, and also investigates its limits.

Coming to prominence in the shadow of serial composition and its luminaries, such as

Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Ligeti and the spectral composers adopt similar

strategies to differentiate themselves from the perceived establishment in new music. They

intertwine musical and political reasoning in ways that follow Theodor Adorno’s “The Aging of

the New Music” and Cornelius Cardew’s “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism,” to name just two of

the more polemic examples.4 In his “Decision and Automatism in Structure Ia,” for instance,

Ligeti’s questions about integral-serial procedures in Boulez’s piece originate in musical features

but quickly extend to more philosophical points. Many of these complaints have to do with the

perceptibility of the work’s serial structure and its treatment of musical parameters, both

individually and in combination. Dynamics, for example, are more likely to be perceived as

general areas rather than fixed values and to be understood in relation to their surrounding

context; thus the ability to discern and identify twelve distinct and consistent dynamic levels

becomes highly problematic. Dynamics are also related to the perception of timbral features, for

example, Boulez’s attack characteristics. Moreover, register affects how both dynamics and

accent are heard. Ligeti observes, then, that timbre is not truly an independent domain, but

depends on interrelationships with other parameters, and cannot be treated in a parallel way with

pitch or duration—a transplantation he considers arbitrary and “pointless.” 5

While these observations may seem to be a simple matter of artistic difference, Ligeti

often couches them in much stronger language. While he is careful not to make wholesale

equivalencies, he does discuss these issues in terms of freedom and control, comparing the

compositional situation to a self-constructed prison or a neurosis, and questioning the degree to

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which automatic processes are chosen for their rigid internal consistency rather than for their

audible result.6 Slavish submission to the arbitrary strictures of a system is characterized even

more starkly in “Metamorphoses of Musical Form” in which Ligeti describes “the fetish of total

integration” leading to “an imitative academicism that is certainly no better than the traditional

sort.”7 While he spares the leading figures from this direct criticism, Ligeti paints integral

serialism as a whole as driven by dogma at the expense of perceptual concerns. This maps onto

Ligeti’s descriptions of interpersonal politics within this circle of composers. In later reflections,

Ligeti moves freely from discussing musical ideologies to characterizations of individual

personalities and their actions. For example, in an extended talk about Darmstadt with Eckhard

Roelcke, he slips from the artistic to the political, describing Heinz-Klaus Metzger’s attack on

Luigi Nono as “pure political propaganda” and Stockhausen’s treatment of Cardew as an act of

“colonialism.”8

Such charged discourse around artistic innovations goes a degree farther with early texts

by many of the spectralists. Eric Drott has observed how these writings mix objective, scientific,

or academic language describing and legitimizing their compositional aesthetic with more

impassioned exhortations that read as manifestos and have political undercurrents, recalling the

language of new social movements following the upheavals of 1968. In doing so, they adopt

anti-authoritarian stances, rejecting the reification of societal categories and pushing for a

renegotiated and more fluid status for the individual within the collective. 9 Particularly important

to this line of argument is the notion that the separate parameters of pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and

timbre, so rigidly defined within the integral serial mindset, were false—disproven by research

into acoustics and, moreover, suspect in their reflection of values taken from one leading

parameter (pitch) and forcibly ascribed to others, almost as an act of violence.

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Gérard Grisey’s early formulations of spectral music often rely on undercutting the

separation of fixed parameters exemplified by integral serialism. In his “La Musique: le devenir

des sons,” he outlines his conception of a new music that is differential, liminal, and transitory,

stating that the “main contribution” of this position “consists of the liquidation of fixed

categories in favor of Synthesis and Interactivity on the one hand, and in approaching an optimal

balance between the Conceptual and Perceptual on the other.” 10 As Grisey delves into the

implications of his approach, he frequently pivots from purely acoustic features to politicized

characterizations of the ideologies involved. The differential nature of sound, for example,

demands that one respect “the different ‘races and ethnicities’ of sound,” and as such, Grisey

argues, his approach opposes the hierarchies of “tonal and neo-tonal colonialism” on the one

side, and resists the false egalitarianism of “serial and post serial leveling,” on the other, since

this threatens to eliminate difference altogether. 11 Later in this essay, while explaining how a

liminal music would take advantage of ambiguities between traditional categories, Grisey attacks

serialism again, stating very directly that research on psychoacoustic thresholds “reveals such a

network of correlations that the very notion of parameters as defined and isolated by serial music

seems obsolete and unable to account for sonic phenomena.” 12 In his 1998 essay, “Did You Say

Spectral?,” Grisey posits the “integration of all sounds,” and particularly “the integration of

harmony and timbre within a single entity,” as some of the compelling consequences of the

spectral approach.13 Here, either consciously or not, he echoes Ligeti’s description of Lontano, in

which, according to the composer, “the quality of tone color switches over to the quality of

harmony, and harmonic-polyphonic metamorphoses gain the appearance of tone-color

transformations.”14 Both composers, then, cite issues of perception as reasons to reject integral

serialism as unnatural, and in response both place similar importance on timbre as the source of
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diversity, fluidity, and progressive innovation in their music and of radical nonconformance in

their greater artistic personae.

When differentiating themselves from serial composition, their rhetorical devices are

similar, but as they come into increasing contact, Ligeti and the spectralists begin to forge new

narratives to maintain distinction from one another. Grisey and Rădulescu had relatively direct

contact with Ligeti, attending his Darmstadt seminars, but even the composers who did not still

tend to position themselves with respect to his music, and to do so in specific ways. Kaija

Saariaho’s works from the 1980s, stemming from her time in Paris and early experiences at

IRCAM, seem to stand out as the ones most closely tied to the main current of spectralism and

also those in which the influence of Ligeti is most pronounced. 15 In an interview with Ivanka

Stoianova, Saariaho says, “Of course during a certain period I liked Ligeti very much: I only

later discovered that he had done a lot in the direction in which I wanted to go myself.” 16 Her

statement contains two points that are common to many of these composers’ narratives

concerning Ligeti: that she discovered their commonality only indirectly or in retrospect, and that

she went further in this particular direction.

Horaţiu Rădulescu’s interview with Bob Gilmore is even more telling in this regard. In it

he brings up Ligeti on several occasions, simultaneously appealing to him as an authority while

also separating his work from truly spectral practices. Rădulescu emphasizes Ligeti’s approval of

his own String Quartet no. 4, but he is quick to add that the older composer “never knew exactly

the spectral technique, I think.”17 At a later point in the interview, Rădulescu recalls his reply to a

comment from Harry Halbreich that “Schoenberg is your grandfather, and Scelsi your father.”

Rădulescu answered, in his charming turn of phrase, “It’s true. And maybe an uncle is Ligeti.” 18

In his assessment, then, Rădulescu acknowledges Ligeti, but places him outside the direct lineage
 Levy 7

of the spectral school, and seems to exclude his membership based on a lack of knowledge of the

essential techniques or particular tools of the trade.

In several of his articles and lectures, Tristan Murail posits Ligeti as a direct influence on

Grisey—a precedent for the formal smoothness of Jour contre-jour and for the transformation of

complex textural states in Modulations, discussed below.19 More often, however, Murail pairs

Ligeti with Scelsi as precursors who intuitively appreciated the “decomposition” of sounds into a

close scrutiny of their component parts. One can see how the division between spectral attitude

and technique runs through these narratives. While Rădulescu seemed to exclude Ligeti based on

technique, Murail actually downplays this when compared to having the right outlook:

The connection… lies in this attitude, more than in a comparable style or

aesthetic; the compositional techniques are completely different, except for a few

superficial similarities (microtones, attention to dynamics, continuous processes).

But this attitude… is crucially important. It is a complete change of viewpoint, a

wholesale reversal of the western musical tradition, which for centuries has been

based on combination and superposition. We no longer seek to com-pose, juxta-

pose, or super-pose, but rather to de-compose, or even more simply, to pose the

sonic material.20

Grisey also emphasizes attitude, which for him favors an absolute music, at least when setting

forth the orthodox vision of the movement’s aims. Paraphrasing his now-famous formulation, the

model for spectral music should be sound itself, not literature, mathematics, or any of the other

arts or sciences.21 This distinction between attitude and technique is an important framework to

examine, and through the analytical examples that follow I will first suggest ways in which

similarities between Ligeti’s techniques and spectral ones are more than superficial. Then I will
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question the extent of the similarity between Ligeti and the spectralists, both in attitude and in

the aesthetic objectives they sought out in their music.

Acoustics, Perception, and Spectral Techniques

Ligeti’s work in the electronic music studio of the WDR, and the foundation in acoustics he

gained there, provide some initial evidence for the sophistication of his knowledge, going

beyond mere intuition. The development of material for his unfinished Pièce électronique no. 3

is an important case study in this regard. Like Grisey’s Modulations, the composition is based on

harmonic and subharmonic spectra.22 Here, Ligeti worked out the frequencies to divide each of

the four octaves between 500 and 8000 hertz into possible arrangements with different numbers

of partials. He hoped that arrangements of harmonically related components would lead to the

perception of a virtual fundamental and that closely spaced components in the high registers

would produce the related psychoacoustic effect of difference tones. He describes his original

conception of the piece to Péter Várnai, saying, “My idea was that a sufficient number of

overtones without the fundamental would, as a result of their combined acoustic effect, sound the

fundamental…. I imagined that slowly, different composite sounds would emerge and slowly

fade away again like shadows.”23 In actuality he found that these were more difficult to achieve

than he first imagined, requiring more precise control than the equipment in Cologne would

allow, but his compositional plan for the work bears out many of these designs.

A sub-group within structure 3 makes a compelling arrangement in which a low pitch

sequence could emerge from the succession of harmonic spectra. Ligeti constructs a progression

of seven spectra, as shown in Example 1. With some allowance for rounding, these fall very

close to the natural overtones of virtual fundamentals between 36 and 100 Hz. The number of

partials and their specific frequencies are chosen to fit within the octave between 500 and 1000
 Levy 9

Hz, and some of the spectra are minimally distorted (no more than 8 Hz) in order to sustain the

1000-Hz frequency as a common tone across all the spectral chords. With this octave acting as a

kind of formant region, the spectra gradually contract, raising the implied fundamental, before

relaxing it slightly lower at the end of the sequence.

Insert Example 1. here

From this rather conspicuous attempt to use difference tones, formant regions, and virtual

fundamentals, Ligeti moves in a more intuitive direction with his instrumental compositions, yet

one can still tell that these were conceived with knowledge of the acoustic effects that he learned

in Cologne. Significant passages often involve high, loud clusters in the woodwinds—conditions

likely to produce difference tones in the audible range. Consider, for example, one of the most

striking passages in the work Atmosphères: letter G (m. 40) where a cluster in the piccolos (F7 to

G#7) suddenly plummets to the basses, playing a quadruple-forte cluster from C#1 to G#1. In a

piece that privileges smooth transitions and gradually evolving sound, it is possible that a low,

rumbling difference tone might appear beneath the piccolos, and help prefigure the motion to the

basses. In turn, the upper harmonics and surface noise of the basses will reach into the higher

registers, each side of this dramatic moment helping actualize the negative space first below, and

then above the pitches notated in the score. 24 Ligeti also features loud, high-frequency woodwind

sounds in the ninth of the Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet. In fact, he describes this piece as a

conscious attempt to use difference tones, which he had observed in acoustic settings but first

came to understand through his work in the electronic studio. 25

Another feature of Ligeti’s music can be seen in connection to the common spectral

technique of interpolation. Joshua Fineberg describes the importance of interpolations in

achieving a “smooth transformation from one state to another,” remarking that “these are used in

almost all aspects of the music, especially pitches and rhythms.” 26 Saariaho discusses
Example 1. Ligeti, Pièce électronique no. 3, harmonic spectra from structure 3
 Levy 10

interpolations extensively in her article “Timbre and Harmony: Interpolations of Timbral

Structures,” and her Vers le blanc (1982), represented in Example 2a, stands out as perhaps the

most extreme example of interpolation.27 In this work for tape, the basic pitch structure of the

piece is a gradual transition from one three-note chord to another, slowly gliding over the course

of fifteen minutes. This motion is coupled with timbral transformations including the

establishment of formant regions of different sizes and interpolations between different phoneme

models.28 Most approaches to interpolation, however, subdivide such processes into discrete

steps, helping execute the transitional process in stages. For example, Fineberg also presents the

derivation of harmonies for Section VIII of Murail’s Désintégrations, transcribed in Example

2b. In the upper system, the treble element begins on the 21st partial of C#1 and moves by

quarter tone, while the bass begins on the 3rd partial and moves by half-step, gradually distorting

the overall structure. To this framework, Murail adds other notes and even alters the order of the

chords, in a process of “permutation, filtering, and complementation.” 29

Insert Example 2a. here

Insert Example 2b. here
Insert Example 2c. here
Grisey’s Modulations also features interpolated harmonies forming the background of

much more complicated textures. In this work, Grisey defines theoretical chord structures based

on the spectra of brass mutes. The lower part of Example 2c shows the harmonic spectrum of a

cup mute and two progressively inharmonic distortions (chords d, d', and d''). 30 The upper part of

Example 2c shows the progression of harmonies found in one of the four instrumental groupings

in the score (group A′), from rehearsal number 37 to 39. The interval structure of the initial chord

replicates the mute in its original form (chord d), but with the fifth raised by a quarter tone.

Through several steps, Grisey arrives at the interval structure of chord d', and by the last chord he
Example 2a. Saariaho, Vers le blanc, pitch structure

Example 2b. Murail, Désintégrations, interpolations for section VIII

Example 2c. Grisey, Modulations, interpolations for rehearsal numbers 37-39
 Levy 11

arrives at a structure approaching d''. These chords, however, are only the start of a generative

process building up one of the most complicated textures of the piece. The pitches shown in this

example are found as the high-points of melodic neumes (slurred groupings in the score) that

refer back to the Prologue of Les espaces acoustiques. These melodic fragments introduce other

notes below the given pitch, and they are then put into canon with one another, sometimes with

repetitions or permutations. Parallel processes unfold simultaneously in instrumental groups B′,

C′, and D′, which use chords based on different mutes. The dense texture makes the chords hard

to discern at first. They emerge, however, as the melodic elements become more uniform,

decelerate, and come into greater coordination as part of a global trajectory that Grisey describes

as the “progressive coagulation” of the texture from a polyphony of twenty voices to a

polyphony of chordal blocks.31 The interpolations in pitch, then, help regulate other processes of

temporal unfolding and textural transformation, resulting in a complex, nebulous, and shifting

whole. It is this type of passage in Modulations that Murail cites as particularly reminiscent of

Ligeti, and a comparison to the Chamber Concerto may help substantiate this similarity. 32

In Ligeti’s works from the 1967 organ etude Harmonies onward, he uses a particular type

of chromatic voice leading, in which the most common types of transformation are those that

either move a note of the chord a semitone away, or those that add or remove a pitch from the

collection, allowing for a slow and measured rate of change. This kind of voice leading links

together pillar chords that are often plotted out in the sketches through incremental steps, much

like those generated by interpolation. In sketches for the second movement of the Chamber

Concerto, for example, Ligeti works with an eight-voice harmonic skeleton. The initial harmony

mixes major seconds with major and minor thirds, stretching from E3 to D5. Through a

meandering series of chromatic shifts over the first twenty-six measures, this contracts to a
 Levy 12

chromatic cluster from A#3 to F4. Through this time, then, the uppermost voice has traveled nine

semitones down, while the lowermost has moved up by six, compressing the original shape in an

irregular way, with different voices changing at different speeds.

While Ligeti plots out the entire movement as a large harmonic skeleton in his sketches,

he realizes this in varied ways, adding nuance to the evolving texture of the piece. The opening

harmonies are voiced in different and changing instruments, so that the uppermost voice of the

sketch is given to the first violin, transferred to the oboe d’amore, and then to the clarinet as it

moves from D to C# to C natural in measures 1–6. The Hammond organ takes the entire

progression in more straightforward fashion from measures 9 to 12, and starting in measure 13,

the clarinet arpeggiates the underlying chord as a compound melody, and other instruments

follow in canon. After achieving a complete chromatic cluster in measure 27, Ligeti begins

thinning the texture down to a three-note cluster in measure 34, before resetting the texture

through the use of a tritone signal harmony voiced through many octaves.

The second half of the work then begins a new process, beginning from two widely

separated harmonies in measure 40—a [025] signal harmony in the bass (C#3, E3, F#3) and a

diatonic cluster in the treble (Ab5, Bb5, C6, D6, Eb6)—and proceeding to a resonant chord of

stacked perfect fifths, spanning from B0 to C6 in measure 77. 33 This arrival is shown in

Example 3, both in his sketch and my reconstruction of this part of the harmonic skeleton. Here

Ligeti combines the modes of presentation seen in the first half. The upper sonority is voiced in

canonic polyphony while the lower one proceeds in more sustained tones. Each evolves at its

own rate of speed, complicating the temporal structure of the work, but they eventually coalesce

in a unified presentation, revealing the underlying chords that bring the movement to its close.
 Levy 13

As in Désintégrations and Modulations this gradual harmonic process is a framework that

supports more complex changes in texture and orchestration.

Insert Example 3a. here

Insert Example 3b. here
In addition to modeling sonorities off of idealized harmonic and subharmonic structures,

spectral composers often used more complex instrumental sounds as models. The now classic

example of this idea is the instrumental synthesis of a low trombone sound in Grisey’s iconic

Partiels, where the source sound is stated first in the instrument itself, then echoed, expanded,

and enlivened by the ensemble. Many of these instrumental sounds contain distortions and

deviations from the ideal, which became a source of compositional approaches using noise and

further blurring the line between pitch and timbre. For example, in her 1986 composition,

Lichtbogen, Kaija Saariaho models the basic sonorities of the piece from extended techniques on

the cello. Julian Anderson explains that “The generative sources for its harmonies were two

sound-spectra from the cello: the first a complex, multiphonic sound obtained by playing a

natural harmonic with gradually increased bowing-pressure; the second a glissando between two

natural harmonics resulting in a complex, irregularly oscillating series of pitches.” 34 Saariaho’s

own description adds that the structures derived from these analyses “are often combined [with]

the original playing manners of the analysed sound, so that harmony and timbral thinking stem

from the same source.”35

In the opening passages of Lichtbogen, centered around F#4, this plays out in clear order.

First, Saariaho brings in very pure sounds—the alto flute and contrabass harmonic, senza vibrato.

As seen in the spectrograph (Example 4), this yields a bare fundamental. The sound is treated

with reverberation and quickly adds upper partials as other strings join, crescendo, and move

from sul tasto to normal position. The partials widen on the spectrograph as they add vibrato,
Example 3a. Ligeti, Chamber Concerto, II, large-scale pitch structure

Example 3b. Ligeti, Chamber Concerto, II, details from sketches of the harmonic skeleton.
Reproduced with permission from the György Ligeti Collection of the Paul Sacher Sacher
Foundation, Basel
 Levy 14

tremolo, microtonal glissandi, and intermittent attacks in the other instruments, pushing gently

towards noise. At the end a contrabass harmonic—close to one of the source sounds of the

piece—returns to the lone fundamental. The second section augments many of these timbral

effects as more purely pitch-based ideas, adding notes above the F# fundamental that are

generally displaced by a semitone from one of the stronger partials, capturing some of the

tension of one of these transient states.36 Later gestures use increased bow pressure to bend the

pitch and introduce noise elements to the source sound more dramatically at the climax of the

piece, before returning to pitch. Saariaho has spoken of the axis between pitch and noise as an

important organizing principle in her work, and here it plays out from the microcosmic elements

of her source sounds to the large-scale formal design of Lichtbogen.37

Insert Example 4. here

While Ligeti makes no claim to have modeled his Cello Concerto (1966) on any

particular source sound, the opening of the first movement contains striking similarities to

Lichtbogen, and can be heard as an important precedent to the style of instrumental synthesis

found in this piece. The progression from a sparse fundamental, to a richer harmonic sound, to a

noisier sound plays out in the same order, and is followed by the addition of non-harmonic tones

clouding, distorting, and widening the pitch spectrum of the original sound. An interchange

between the solo cello and ensemble is seen in the spectrograph of Example 5. Ligeti begins

with very pure sounds, builds up brighter upper partials, and then pulls back in a few successive

gestures, rather than one continuous arc. The solo cello’s espressivo gestures often lead in this

regard. The resulting increase in harmonic upper partials at 1′31″ and 1′43″ prepare the entrance

of the brighter brass instruments at 1′47″ (up to this point only the much sparser wind sounds of

the clarinet and flute have been heard). At the same time, the cello also leads another kind of

process: a move to a diffuse tremolo at 1′37″ widens the fundamental seen on the spectrograph;
Example 4. Saariaho, spectrograph of Lichtbogen, opening

Example 5. Ligeti, spectrograph of a passage from the Cello Concerto

 Levy 15

this is then transferred to become a trill in the clarinet, widening the band even further, and

crossing the perceptual threshold from timbre to pitch. Together these set in motion further pitch

expansions that accelerate through the movement, and while the cello is not literally a source

sound for the piece, its timbral inflections are activated and amplified in pitch as the ensemble

responds to the sonic gestures of the soloist.

Insert Example 5. here

Eclectic Influences and Questioning Spectral Attitude

Returning to think about spectral attitude, however, Ligeti and Saariaho seem to use these

techniques not so purely as the investigation of acoustic properties, but in much more human

terms. Saariaho, for example, gives a multivalent account of her aesthetic aims in Lichtbogen.

She cites not only the sonic properties of her source sounds, but also the inspiration of the

northern lights of her native Finland, Henry Vaughan’s poem “The World,” and, in her use of

electronics, a childhood experience. In an interview with Ivanka Stoianova, she says:

Even as a child I loved to play with my father’s tape recorder: you could sing very

close to the microphone with a very intimate, very soft voice and then you could

play the same thing back very, very loud. This is a little bit of what I did later with

the regular instruments at my disposal… the playing techniques which themselves

produced a soft, clear sound, partially on the edge of the audible; a sound, which I

sought to amplify and then to alter, which evokes a somewhat unreal feeling:

something very intimate, but that fills an entire stage. 38

Ligeti, too, when describing the culmination of the first movement of the Cello Concerto,

tends to personify the unfolding events. As the movement continues, he achieves a registral

separation of soloist and ensemble through gradual chromatic separation from a signal harmony.
 Levy 16

At measure 36, Ligeti switches from the previous cluster to B bs voiced across six octaves. Like

the E of the opening, these start to spread chromatically, each octave evolving in a slightly

different way, until a sudden cut-off at measure 54 leaves only the most widely separated

registers: the soloist on F#7 and two contrabasses on G#1 and A1. In Ligeti’s formulation,

however, these are not simply investigations of acoustic extremes, coming into focus as the end

goal of a kind of gradual transformation, they also have poignant associations: “In the first

movement, the end suggests being alone and forsaken: the solo cello remains above the

abysmally deep basses as if at an immeasurable height, until its dangerously thin, whistling

flageolet finally breaks.”39 Compared to the type of spectral attitude put forth by Murail and

Grisey—where one simply “poses” the sound, or where music is seen as an exploration of sonic

realities through acoustics and perception—this affective and deeply emotional content stands

somewhat at odds.

As this preference for absolute music softens in later spectral composition, it often does

so by replacing this sense of scientific inquiry with one of spiritual or mystic exploration. Signs

of this are seen even as early as Grisey’s Jour, contre-jour (1978–79), in which differently scaled

temporal structures are imbued with references to the Egyptian Book of the Dead; such

Egyptological themes become even more explicit in Anubis-Nout (1982) and Quatre chants pour

franchir le seuil (1997–98). A tendency towards mysticism can be found in Rădulescu as well,

whose concept of “sound plasma” recognizes sound as being in constant flux—similar to

Grisey’s ideas of liminality and hybridization—but glosses this in a particularly spiritual way.

Rădulescu writes that “the transformations of sound plasma occur according to two different

speeds, one ‘planetary,’ the other ‘cosmic,’” and he links these to concepts of

“paraconsciousness” and to types of ritual and magical states of the soul. 40 From his earliest
 Levy 17

spectral composition, Credo for nine cellos (1969), to A Doini—an “abstract prayer” that seems

to have caught Ligeti’s attention in 1974—a characteristic mixture of Christian faith and Eastern

mysticism pervades his music.41

An eclectic spirituality is also prominent in the works of Jonathan Harvey. He

acknowledges the influence of Rudolf Steiner on works including, Inner Light (1973–77), and

his upbringing as a chorister is seen in Mortuos plango, vivos voco (1980), which uses the great

tenor bell at Winchester Cathedral as a source sound. His later interest in Buddhism and other

eastern religions comes up in compositions from Bhatki (1982) to Body Mandala (2006) and

other pieces that create an aura of ritual. He has described the importance of timbre as something

amorphous and hard to quantify, “a concept that disappears into other things… but which

reappears in an indefinable way in aesthetic experience.” And he goes on to say that “this

particular interchange between reason and soul is highly illuminating, and brings the

‘indefinable’ into ever sharper definition.” 42 For Harvey, and others working with more mystical

applications of spectral techniques, this is akin to expanding one’s consciousness; dissolving

recognizable images or categories of sound becomes a parallel to relinquishing the boundaries of

self-identity, or releasing the ego in a way that is so important to Buddhism and other meditative

practices.

Ligeti, in contrast, quite explicitly rejects this kind of religiosity in the music of Claude

Vivier, while still praising his originality, technique, and the way he created vivid imaginary

musical worlds.43 As Ligeti came into closer dialogue with spectral composers and their

practices, he took special care to separate his works and overall aesthetic. At times Ligeti seems

to disparage this kind of mysticism, and at other times he labels spectralism as a school, with the

same kind of pejorative connotations of cold and technical academicism that were leveled
 Levy 18

against serialism. In introducing his Hamburg Concerto, for example, he distinguishes his use of

natural horns and non-equal-tempered tuning systems by declaring, “However, I do not write

fashionable overtone music, but rather use the overtones for non-harmonic chord combinations. I

haven’t created a strictly ordered system, but rather, I let the sounds loose—in their own

organization—thereby establishing different types of tonal coherence than those in the

tradition.”44 Yet in his sketches for this piece, Ligeti reveals that affinities with these composers

were on his mind. In a prose sketch for a projected first movement, Ligeti references Grisey

specifically when contemplating the use of continuous transformations and natural horns with

different tunings. Moreover, he connects the general idea of metallic spectra to the names of

Murail, Grisey, and Vivier.45

While rejecting certain aspects of Vivier’s aesthetic, Ligeti clearly admired others. Vivier

is the only composer associated with spectralism to receive an extended appreciation in Ligeti’s

collected writings, and with his focus on using spectral techniques to evoke distant lands and

cultures, he provides another illuminating case study in comparison to Ligeti. In Vivier, this

feeling often occurs through the creation of artificial languages and through the use of arresting

chords including microtonal components. Vivier has called his Prologue pour un Marco Polo “a

meditation on a state of being—that of the misunderstood searcher” and the invented language he

uses suggests “the general incomprehension that poor Marco hit up against.” 46 Acoustically in

his langue inventée, the timbres of different syllable changes combine with instrumental effects

to produce an otherworldly and incomprehensible utterance—straddling the line between

language and pure sound. As a student of Stockhausen, his immediate influence is most likely

Stimmung, but moments in Ligeti’s earlier Aventures also use rapid syllable changes and timbral

effects to approach the same grey area and haunting effect.

 Levy 19

In Vivier’s music that makes explicit references to an imagined East, he often combines

this invented language with les couleurs: chords derived by the principle of combination tones,

especially those that use sums of the frequencies of harmonic partials above a generating dyad. 47

One goal of these spectral chords, which often introduce closely spaced microtonal pitches into

the texture, is to create the acoustic effect of roughness. Roughness occurs when components of

a sound have frequencies close to one another, and has been an important acoustic property,

described by Stephen McAdams and Bruno Giordano as “an elementary timbral attribute based

on the sensation of rapid fluctuations in the amplitude envelope. It can be generated by proximal

frequency components that beat with one another.”48 As such, the category of roughness relates

to sensory dissonance in intervals and to the perception of tension more generally. Grisey

himself invokes the idea of roughness as an appealing way to work directly on psychoacoustic

perception, outside of any particular tuning system or the culturally learned categories of

consonance and dissonance that accompany it. 49 In his later music, Ligeti, too, would use closely

spaced, microtonal sonorities to generate roughness as part of a greater expressive purpose,

separating his music from the Western tradition of equal temperament.

In the introduction to the score for Bouchara, Vivier states that “the degree of roughness

of the sonorous material depends directly upon the fundamentals” of the generating dyad. This

relationship can be seen clearly in an examination of the progressions shown in Example 6. The

voice part is given in the lowest staff, the generating dyad (formed by the bass and the horn,

which doubles the voice an octave below) in the next highest, and the couleur, voiced by the

winds and string harmonics in the upper two staves, respectively. 50 Generally speaking, intervals

like the octave and perfect fifth will produce more overlap between the summation tones in the

couleur and the natural harmonic series of the generating dyads’ fundamentals. 51 Thus the
 Levy 20

combination tones produced by the C–G fifth in Example 6 are remarkably less rough and more

resonant than those produced by the other intervals, with many of the upper components

matching harmonic partials of C and G. All of this gives this chord a particularly strong

harmonicity not found in those generated by other intervals. While Vivier tends to avoid octaves,

which would generate the most overlap between the harmonic series and potential combination

tones, he does use perfect fifths frequently, including the last syllable of the title word,

Bouchara, whenever it occurs in the first body section of the piece. Each time, the resonance

given to this important syllable has a distinctly audible clarity or resolution from roughness to

harmonicity.

Insert Example 6. here

Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto presents interesting parallels to Vivier’s use of roughness

and harmonicity to enter into microtonal sound worlds. This piece features natural horns using

different fundamentals, each generating notes based on their harmonic series. As in Bouchara,

these components join into complexes with unique moments of resonance and sonic conflict

deriving, at least indirectly, from the relationship between the underlying fundamentals. Through

the course of the fifth movement, suggestively entitled “Spectra,” there are three extended

passages where the solo horn joins the ensemble horns: measures 1–4, 5–7, and 8–13. These

overlap with similar material in the woodwinds, brass, and strings, but the horns begin the

movement together, they continue as a unified strand, and their harmonic glissando in measures

16–17 helps bring the movement to a close. The four ensemble horns consistently work with

partials above an E fundamental, while the solo horn changes between different conflicting

fundamentals, including Bb, Ab, F, A, and Eb, always leaving the tuning of the indicated partials

uncorrected above the given fundamental, as instructed in the score. The uncorrected partials—
Example 6. Vivier, Bouchara, progressions from the first body section
 Levy 21

especially the seventh (or fourteenth), eleventh, and thirteenth—show significant deviation from

their equal-tempered counterparts, creating one type of tension by pushing the limits of

harmonicity, or what we commonly reconcile as being related to the same fundamental. 52

Within this arrangement, however, Ligeti has two additional ways of creating tension

through acoustic roughness. The first occurs when there are adjacent higher partials above the

same fundamental. Example 7a shows all of the simultaneities in the horns, represented as

partials above a given fundamental. The ensemble horns commonly use such arrangements; for

example, the chord that opens the movement voices partials 5, 6, 7, and 9, and the chord that

ends this phrase in measure 4, has shifted up to partials 8, 9, 10, and 11. Many of these notes

sound within a critical bandwidth of one another, creating fast-beating sonorities and the

sensation of acoustic roughness. A second way of intensifying conflict arises from the solo horn,

which uses a different fundamental to introduce clashing components to the sound. Example 7b

shows the second statement’s sonorities, now calculated as frequencies. Anchored through the

octave, fifth, and root in horns 2 and 4, the ensemble falls into a near-perfect harmonic sonority

on E; meanwhile, the solo horn rubs against this in many ways, playing overtones from the

tritone related Bb fundamental that are close, but distinctly off from the notes of the ensemble,

growing in inharmonicity and then pulling back, as it executes a microtonal slide through

inflections of the notes between B and D#. Through these measures the major second between B

and C#, as notated, is split into five different frequencies (494.4, 524.4, 535.6, 550, and 576.8

Hz) many of which sound simultaneously or in direct succession.

Insert Example 7a. here

Insert Example 7b. here
These measures of tension all seem to release in the last dyad of the sonority, a fairly

conventional major second between C# (now over an A fundamental in the solo horn) and D#.
Example 7a. Ligeti, Hamburg Concerto, V (“Spectra”), simultaneities in the horns, expressed as partials above a given
fundamental
mm. 1-4 AA BB
Solo Horn in Bb Ab F
8 8 6 6 9 9 9 7 7 10 10 10 12 12 10 10 10 11 11 11
Horns in E
Horn 1 9 9 9 10 10 9 9 11 11 11 12 12 13 13 13 14 14 11
Horn 2 6 6 6 7 7 6 6 8 8 8 10 10 11 11 11 11 11 9
Horn 3 7 7 7 8 8 7 7 9 9 9 11 11 12 12 12 13 13 10
Horn 4 5 5 5 6 6 4 4 6 6 6 8 8 9 9 9 10 10 8

mm. 5-7
Solo Horn in Bb A
3 4 4 7 5 5 9 9 10
Horns in E
Horn 1 10 9 9 12 13 14 15
Horn 2 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 3
Horn 3 7 11 11 11 10
Horn 4 2 2 2 2 2 2

mm. 8-13 CC DD
Solo Horn in F Eb F A Bb
8 8 6 6 6 8 8 7 7 7 10 10 11 11 11 12 12 12 13 13 13 13
Horns in E
Horn 1 9 9 12 12 11 11 11 10 10 10 9 9 9 13 13 14 15 15 15 15
Horn 2 5 5 5 8 8 8 7 7 10 10 9 11 11 12 12
Horn 3 7 7 7 12 12 12 12 12 11 11 11 11 11 12 12 13 13
Horn 4 2 2 2 6 6 9 9 5 9 9 11 11
 mm. 15-18 EE
Solo Horn
in Bb
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Horns in E
Horn 1 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 16
Horn 2 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 14
Horn 3 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
Horn 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Example 7b. Ligeti, Hamburg Concerto, V (“Spectra”), simultaneities in the horns, expressed as frequencies
mm. 5-7
Solo Horn in Bb A
174.81 233.08 233.08 407.89 291.35 291.35 524.43 524.43 550
Horns in E
Horn 1 412 370.8 370.8 494.4 535.6 576.8 618
Horn 2 164.8 123.6 123.6 123.6 123.6 123.6 123.6 123.6
Horn 3 288.4 453.2 453.2 453.2 412
Horn 4 82.4 82.4 82.4 82.4 82.4 82.4
 Levy 22

Here each pitch is only slightly flat from equal temperament (-14 and -12 cents, respectively) and

the intensely beating 11 hertz difference just before the bar line has progressively widened to a

difference of 52 and then 68 hertz, crossing the threshold from being a liminal sonority—hard to

reconcile as separate pitches and more likely to be heard as a single pitch, beating or fluctuating

in intensity—to being a commonly recognizable interval. Although Ligeti’s technique is

certainly different from Vivier’s, it is still the shift from a tritone relationship to a perfect fifth

relationship between the generating fundamentals that helps alleviate acoustic roughness at the

end of the phrase.

The horn has a long history of associations with distance, and in Ligeti’s work another

layer of personal connections adds potential meaning to these techniques. Ligeti’s first use of

“uncorrected” natural harmonics on the horn comes in his Concert Românesc, a piece in which

he tries to capture the experience of hearing a bucium, a type of Romanian alphorn. 53 The use of

the horn often suggests ideas of physical distance—rustic instruments sounding from a

mountainside or post horns approaching from afar—but moreover, for Ligeti this kind of usage

brings up associations with distant lands, and in this way forms another connection to the music

of Vivier. While Ligeti used microtones in compositions like Ramifications and the Double

Concerto, his approach takes a distinct turn in his works from the 1980s. In discussions of his

works from the Piano Concerto and after, Ligeti consistently links his use of alternate tuning

systems and microtones to non-Western or folk music and to his “growing dissatisfaction with

the equal-tempered system.”54 He cites his increased familiarity with Harry Partch and with

musical traditions from Indonesia, Southern Africa, and Papua New Guinea as sources for

discontent with the limitations of equal temperament, and in a discussion of his Violin Concerto,

he adds the music of Vivier to this list. Ligeti discusses this aspect of Vivier’s music in terms
 Levy 23

very similar to his own, praising Vivier’s ability to transcend the mere “conglomeration” of

eclectic influences and produce something that was original: “his own fantasy—a type of

dreamed up folklore.”55 While in his own music he skirts issues of exoticism in using these

materials, saying, “it is not foreignness in itself that is my goal, but rather complexity, and

exoticism only exists in this concerto, if at all, as an allusion.” 56 Whether or not one accepts this

explanation, it points to a common, if multifaceted, concern arising from the growing awareness

of the richness of non-Western traditions. The same zeitgeist that informs works like these, or

Murail’s use of Tibetan and Mongolian source sounds in L’Esprit des dunes, also informs the

politicized wording Grisey uses to critique serialism for its inability to recognize difference.

Conclusions

With Ligeti, then, these spectral techniques often evoke different kinds of distance: not only the

acoustic imitation of echoes and reverberations or a sense of geographical distance, but also

particularly modern states of emotional distance and presence. In the Cello Concerto, the solo

part interacts with the orchestra, leading the ensemble across the threshold from timbre to pitch,

but then becoming separated in register, capturing the sense of alienation that Ligeti ascribes to

the ending. The use of the natural horn is also complex, connecting associations with his

childhood in Transylvania to a wider network of tuning systems outside equal temperament, and

thus, these new microtonal harmonies become emblematic of the conceptual distance he tried to

place between himself and his contemporaries. A recognition of the different manifestations of

this concern with distance and the role it plays in narratives about his music and career might

also reveal new types of connections emerging across the different stylistic periods of the

composer’s work.
 Levy 24

These concerns are not unique to Ligeti, however, and in fact, they are shared by many of

the spectral composers. Beside the alienation of the Cello Concerto stands the electronically

estranged intimacy of Saariaho’s Lichtbogen, and the mystique of the unapproachable or

incomprehensible is common to both Vivier and Ligeti, as are their feelings of being

misunderstood. These composers—expatriates and travelers in their own lives—seem to be

attracted to themes about the allure of foreign locations and nostalgia for a distant home, and

these are reflected by titles including Lontano, L’amour de loin, and Et je reverrai cette ville

étrange. In turn, this preoccupation with distance relates to the outsider status they all sought to

cultivate in their artistic identities. Using Ligeti as a foil to spectral composition, then, highlights

some of these commonalities, and beyond pointing out similarities in technique, I hope that it

also problematizes the role of attitude, especially as the spectral movement begins to drift from

its concern with the acoustical foundations of music and turns to wider expressive ideas. Perhaps

we can find just as meaningful a set of connections in their responses to a shared historical and

political moment as we find in their shared interest in the deconstruction of sound. Identifying as

outsiders, both musically and rhetorically, they were able to develop their compositional

resources in a variety of ways in order to express the physical, cultural, and emotional distances

that were common to their experiences—and it is in this greater network of relationships that we

may find the most enduring links between Ligeti and spectralism.
 Levy 25

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1
Gérard Grisey, “Les derives sonores de Gérard Grisey, Entretien avec Guy Lelong,” in Ecrits,
ou l’invention de la musique spectrale, ed. Guy Lelong with Anne-Marie Réby (Paris:
Editions MF, 2008), 235.
2
P.A. Castanet, “Gérard Grisey and the Foliation of Time,” Contemporary Music Review 19, no.
3 (2000): 39–40.
3
Julian Anderson, “A Provisional History of Spectral Music,” Contemporary Music Review 19,
no. 2 (2000): 12.
4
Theodor W. Adorno, “The Aging of the New Music” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert,
trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002), 181–202; Cornelius Cardew, “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism,” in Stockhausen
Serves Imperialism, and Other Articles, 46–55 (London: Latimer New Dimensions,
1974). The following discussion is also indebted to Eric Drott, “Spectralism, Politics and
the Post-Industrial Imagination,” in The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, ed.
Björn Heile, 39–60 (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2009) and to Charles Wilson, “György
Ligeti and the Rhetoric of Autonomy,” Twentieth-Century Music 1, no. 1 (2004): 5–28.
 Levy 28

5
György Ligeti, “Pierre Boulez: Decision and Automatism in Structure 1a,” in “Young
Composers,” special issue, Die Reihe 4, English ed., trans. Leo Black (Bryn Mawr, PA:
Presser, 1960): 36–62. The quote is on p. 39.
6
Ibid., see wording on 36–37, 53, and 61–62.
7
György Ligeti, “Metamorphoses of Musical Form,” in “Form—Space,” special issue, Die Reihe
7, English ed., trans. Cornelius Cardew (Bryn Mawr, PA: Presser, 1965): 5–19. The quote
is on p. 10.
8
György Ligeti, “Träumen Sie in Farbe?” György Ligeti im Gespräch mit Eckhard Roelcke
(Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2003), 97 and 95. All translations are the author’s unless
indicated otherwise.
9
Drott, “Spectralism, Politics.”
10
Gérard Grisey, “La Musique: le devenir des sons,” Darmstädter Beiträge zur neuen Musik 19
(1984): 16.
11
Ibid., 16–17.
12
Ibid., 19.
13
Gérard Grisey, “Did You Say Spectral?” trans. Joshua Fineberg, Contemporary Music Review
19, no. 3 (2000): 2.
14
György Ligeti, “Lontano” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Monika Lichtenfeld. (Mainz: Schott,
2007), 2:245.
15
For a similar appraisal and more discussion of the composer’s life and works, see Pirkko
Moisala, Kaija Saariaho (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), esp. 76–77.
16
Quoted in Ivanka Stoianova, “Kaija Saariaho: Im Inneren des Klangs: Die Wege des
Bewußtseins,” in Klangportrait: Kaija Saariaho 20–32 (Berlin: Musikfrauen, 1991). The
quote is on p. 23.
17
Bob Gilmore, “‘Wild Ocean’: An interview with Horaţiu Rădulescu,” Contemporary Music
Review 22, nos. 1–2 (2003): 106.
18
Ibid., 109.
19
Tristan Murail “Scelsi and L’Itinéraire: The Exploration of Sound,” trans. Robert Hasegawa,
Contemporary Music Review 24, nos. 2–3 (2005): 181–85, esp. 184; and “Villeneuve-lès-
Avignon Conferences, Centre Acanthes, 9–11 and 13 July 1992,” trans. Aaron Berkowitz
and Joshua Fineberg, Contemporary Music Review 24, nos. 2–3 (2005): 187–267, esp.
247–48 and 267n21.
20
Tristan Murail, “Scelsi, de-composer,” trans. Robert Hasegawa, Contemporary Music Review
24, nos. 2–3 (2005): 173. The italics are in the original.
21
Grisey, “La musique,” 22.
22
On harmonic and subharmonic structures in Grisey, see François Rose, “Introduction to the
Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music,” Perspectives of New Music 34, no. 2
(1996): 15–16. I discuss the genesis and structure of Pièce électronique no. 3 in greater
 Levy 29

detail in chapter 2 of my Metamorphosis in Music: The Compositions of György Ligeti in

the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), esp. 62–71.
23
György Ligeti, Ligeti in Conversation, trans. Gabor J. Schabert, Sarah E. Soulsby, Terence
Kilmartin, and Geoffrey Skelton. (London: Ernst Eulenburg, 1983), 37. Grisey also uses
the metaphor of “shadow tones” to describe combination tones (see Rose, “Introduction,”
21).
24
Roger H.W. Savage makes an analogous claim that the low D#–E semitone opening
Apparitions, could generate an upper-register combination tone adumbrating the ending
of the first movement. See his Structure and Sorcery: The Aesthetics of Post-War Serial
Composition and Indeterminacy (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), 87.
25
Ligeti makes his interest in difference tones explicit in “Zu meinen Bläserquintetten,”
Schriften, 2:157. Daniel Pressnitzer and Stephen McAdams also discuss this
phenomenon, using the quintet as an example in “Acoustics, Psychoacoustics and
Spectral Music,” Contemporary Music Review 19 no. 2 (2000): 33–59, esp. 44.
26
Joshua Fineberg, “Guide to the Basic Concepts and Techniques of Spectral Music,”
Contemporary Music Review 19, no. 2 (2000): 108.
27
Kaija Saariaho, “Timbre and Harmony: Interpolations of Timbral Structures,” Contemporary
Music Review 2, no. 1 (1987): 93–133. Example 2a is based on figure 6 of this article.
28
For more detail on the use of the CHANT program to execute complex interpolations between
different phoneme models in Vers le blanc, see chapter 1 of Landon Morrison, “Sounds,
Signals, Signs: Transductive Currents in Post-Spectral Music at IRCAM” (Ph.D. diss.
McGill University, 2019).
29
Joshua Fineberg, ed. “Appendix II: Musical Examples,” Contemporary Music Review 19, no. 2
(2000): 115-34. The text is found in Example 2b, which is based on a figure from p. 125.
Murail’s Gondwana has been analyzed as another type of interpolation, in which the
transitional chords are generated as hybrid structures, combining different elements from
the preceding and subsequent chords, rather than by transposing elements. In addition to
Fineberg and Rose, see Marc-André Dalbavie, “Notes sur Gondwana,” Entretemps 8
(1989): 139–45 and Viviana Moscovich, “French Spectral Music: An Introduction,”
Tempo 200 (April 1997): 21–27.
30
These chord labels follow Jérôme Baillet, Gérard Grisey: Fondements d’une écriture (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2000), 128. They are identified as derived from the analysis of cup-mute
sounds in Anne Lebaron and Denys Bouliane, “Darmstadt 1980,” Perspectives of New
Music 19 no. 1–2 (1980): 420–41, especially their figure 2, which presumably originated
from Grisey’s lecture; see also the detailed analysis in Sascha Lino Lemke’s
“‘…sublimiert zu einem ständigen klanglichen Werden…’: Gérard Griseys ‘Modulations
pour 33 musiciens,’” in 1001 Mikrotöne, ed. Sarvenaz Safari and Manfred Stahnke, 237–
310 (Neumünster: von Bockel Verlag, 2015). François Rose differs substantially, and
presents these chord structures with different labels in Examples 8 and 18 of his
“Introduction.”
31
Grisey, “La musique,” 23.
32
Murail, “Villeneuve-lès-Avignon,” 267n21.
 Levy 30

33
Jérôme Baillet (Gérard Grisey, 8–9) has noted that this spacing of the [025] signal harmony in
Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna and Lontano has acoustic significance and can be understood as the
6th, 7th, and 8th partials above a missing fundamental.
34
Julian Anderson, “Seductive Solitary: Julian Anderson Introduces the Work of Kaija
Saariaho,” Musical Times 133, no. 1798 (December 1992): 617.
35
http://saariaho.org/works/lichtbogen/, webpage accessed, 1/31/2017
36
According to Vesa Kankaanpää “Dichotomies, Relationships: Timbre and Harmony in
Revolution” in Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues, ed. Tim Howell, Jon
Hargreaves, and Michael Rofe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 159–76, esp. 167–70,
these come from a nine-note constellation, derived from a spectral analysis of the
perceptually prominent partials of one of these transitional cello sounds, some of which
have been rounded significantly to accommodate the equal-temperament of the keyboard
instruments.
37
See, for example, Saariaho, “Timbre and Harmony,” 94–97.
38
Stoianova, “Kaija Saariaho,” 25.
39
György Ligeti, “Konzert für Violoncello und Orchester,” in Schriften, 2:243.
40
Horaţiu Rădulescu, Sound Plasma: Music of the Future Sign or My High D (Munich: Edition
Modern, 1975), 17.
41
Ligeti presided over the SIMC (Società Italiana per Musica Contemporanea) competition in
Rome where this piece received special mention. See Gilmore “Wild Ocean,” 122n2.
42
Jonathan Harvey, “The Mirror of Ambiguity,” in The Language of Electroacoustic Music, ed.
Simon Emmerson, 175–90 (London: Macmillan Press, 1986), 179.
43
See “Zur Musik Claude Viviers” inSchriften, 1:497–501.
44
György Ligeti, “Hamburgisches Konzert,” in Schriften, 2:312.
45
These references come from an early page of the sketches for this piece, scanned as Image
00005 in the György Ligeti Collection of the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, in the
Musikmanuskripte for the Hamburgisches Konzert. The pages that follow also contain
references to Bruckner, Gesualdo, and types of African and Romanian folk music.
46
Vivier’s own program note, as quoted in Bob Gilmore, Claude Vivier: A Composer’s Life
(Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014), 180–81.
47
Bryan Christian has identified these as combination-tone class (CTC) sets; my discussion in
this section is indebted to his “Combination-Tone Class Sets and Redefining the Role of
les Couleurs in Claude Vivier’s Bouchara,” Music Theory Online 20, no. 2 (2014).
48
Stephen McAdams and Bruno Giordano, “The Perception of Musical Timbre,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut, 72–80
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 77. Roughness is also a major topic in
Daniel Pressnitzer and Stephen McAdams, “Acoustics, Psychoacoustics and Spectral
Music,” Contemporary Music Review 19, no. 2 (2000): 33–59.
 Levy 31

49
See Grisey, “La musique,” 16; it is significant that this discussion of roughness as a substitute
for more culturally contextualized terms directly precedes the passage about the “races
and ethnicities of sound” cited above.
50
The bass sounds an octave below the written pitch, but it is the frequency of the written pitch
that Vivier uses in his calculations. The winds in this section are consistently voiced from
low to high as bassoon, clarinet, oboe, and flute. The string harmonics are notated as they
sound in the top staff, given the octave transposition of the clef. These progressions can
be compared to measures 26–27 and 32–33.
51
For example, when the interval of a perfect fifth (3:2) occurs any even integer multiplied to the
melody will yield a result equal to one of the harmonic partials above the bass, and when
this is added to another whole-number multiple of the bass, will remain within the same
harmonic series. This can be generalized further by observing that for a perfect fourth
(4:3), when the multiplier of the melody is divisible by three, the summation tone is a
harmonic of the bass, and so forth, with such harmonic summation tones quickly
becoming rarer (especially at lower orders) as their generating intervals become more
complex.
52
More discussion of the effect of larger prime numbers on harmonicity is found in Clarence
Barlow, On Musiquantics (Mainz: Johannes Gutenberg Universität, 2012) and in Robert
Hasegawa, “Gérard Grisey and the ‘Nature’ of Harmony,” Music Analysis 28, no. 2–3
(2009): 349–71.
53
György Ligeti, “Über mein Concert Românesc und andere Frühwerke aus Ungarn,” in
Schriften, 2:151–53. The quote is on p. 151.
54
György Ligeti, “Violinkonzert (definitive Fassung),” in Schriften, 2:304–6). The quote is on p.
306.
55
György Ligeti, “Zur Musik Calude Viviers,” in Schriften, 1:497–501). The quote is on p. 499.
56
György Ligeti, “Violinkonzert (Urfassung),” in Schriften, 2:302–3). The quote is on p. 303.