From row to Klang: Ligeti's reception of Anton Webern's music

During the last years he spent in Budapest, Ligeti was searching for a new path in his composition technique. Among his first experiments with clusters, total chromaticism, some unfinished works (such as Istar pokoljárása, 1955; Fehér és fekete, 1955-56), show an increase in his interest in dodecaphonic technique. Ligeti approached dodecaphony through the Jelinek handbook “Anleitung zur Zwölftonkomposition” (1952/1958), and wrote critical articles (“Neues aus Budapest: Zwölftonmusik oder ‘Neue Tonalität’? “, Melos 1950), that confirm his involvement in the questions of fundamental stylistic choice in Hungarian music of the 40s and 50s. He also started an ambitious project: a book on Anton Webern. The model was Knud Jeppesen’s monography on Palestrina (as he stated in the correspondence with the musicologist Ove Nordwall). Once in the West, for several years he worked continuously on the project, and wrote many papers and made radio broadcast on Webern’s music. In this way, he also positioned himself in the core of the Webern’s reception of the most representative composers of the Darmstadt school (Nono, Pousseur, Boulez). His writings and sketches for this project (some still unpublished), reveal a gradual turn from the question of the twelve-tone row and structure, to the more general dimensions of harmony and orchestration in Webern’s music. A change that can be obsserved in his own technique in the sixties. Based on the unpublished material, the article will map this important turning phase in Ligeti's opus.