The Emergence of Timbre: Ligeti's Synthesis of Electronic and Acoustic Music in Atmosphères

Abstract

AbstractIn 1957, soon after his emigration from Hungary, György Ligeti began an internship at the electronic music studio of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. The three electronic works Ligeti produced there constitute a small portion of his oeuvre, but it is commonly acknowledged that his experiences in the studio were crucial for his stylistic development. This article makes specific analytical connections between the techniques of elektronische Musik that Ligeti encountered at the WDR and his sound-mass techniques in acoustic composition. The discourses in circulation in the electronic studio of the 1950s – especially as articulated by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Gottfried Michael Koenig – reveal a collective obsession with gaining compositional control over timbre. By internalizing and reusing mainstream elektronische Musik techniques such as additive synthesis, filtering, and Bewegungsfarbe in an acoustic form, Ligeti brought timbre forward as the central compositional problem in the acoustic work Atmosphères.