From: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org (idealcopy-digest) To: idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Subject: idealcopy-digest V9 #158 Reply-To: idealcopy@smoe.org Sender: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk idealcopy-digest Thursday, June 15 2006 Volume 09 : Number 158 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [idealcopy] Gyorgy Ligeti RIP [Fergus Kelly ] [idealcopy] LOST LATER [Wireviews ] Re: [idealcopy] Gyorgy Ligeti RIP ["Bart van Damme" ] [idealcopy] nu yawk [TnA ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 10:41:03 +0100 (BST) From: Fergus Kelly Subject: [idealcopy] Gyorgy Ligeti RIP Gyvrgy Ligeti has died on 12 June in Vienna. from: www.schott-music.com On Monday morning, the Austrian-Hungarian composer Gyvrgy Ligeti died in Vienna at the age of 83 after suffering from a serious illness. With him, we have lost one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. Gyvrgy Ligeti was an adventurer in form and expression and a great visionary of contemporary music. His richly varied output takes a special position in its musical quality and uncompromising individuality. Ligeti moved far away from aesthetic trends and methods all his life. He was characterized by fresh and unorthodox ideas, any form of dogmatism was foreign to his nature, his entire oeuvre is marked by radical turning points. Admired and hugely influential in the profession, the sensual accessibility of his music has won the hearts of audiences everywhere. Atmosphhres, the orchestral work he created in 1961, made Ligeti instantly well-known. In this piece, he worked almost completely without traditional melodic, harmonic and rhythmic parameters and concentrated on sounds with constantly changing textures. Micropolyphony, he once described, means such a dense tissue that the individual parts become inaudible and only the resulting intermingling harmonies are effective as a form'. For him, however, techniques were never an end in themselves. Ligeti did not keep long to iridescent tonal surfaces, but always looked for new paths. His father and brother both died in concentration camps; he himself managed to escape the labour service of the Hungarian army in 1941 and had to flee to Austria after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Deeply affected by these events, he developed a strong dislike of any dictatorship and any form of intellectual restriction: 'I am an enemy of ideologies in the arts. Totalitarian regimes do not like dissonances.' Biochemistry, chaos research, fractal geometry  Ligeti, who initially intended to study physics, found inspiration in the natural world for new compositional principles. During his long years as a teacher of international repute, he encouraged the independence, originality and uncompromising self-criticism of his pupils: 'There is only one tradition. Our music either stands up to it or not.' After his intensive work at the Studio f|r elektronische Musik of the WDR in Cologne in the 1950s and the development of micropolyphony in the 1960s, his personal style became simpler and more transparent in the 1970s. And as if wanting to withdraw from the predominating musical tendencies, he began to use tonal sounds again. Ligeti said: 'I no longer listen to rules on what is to be regarded as modern and what as old-fashioned.' His only full-length stage work Le Grand Macabre was inspired by the theatre of the absurd and is teeming with operetta-like wit and black humour. The composer wanted to communicate more directly with audiences: 'Stage action and music should be dangerous and bizarre, absolutely exaggerated, absolutely crazy.' In the 1980s and 1990s, Ligeti expanded his musical horizons again, incorporating structural principles of African drumming music into his works: the fanatic of the intricate developed new complex polyrhythmic techniques. They form the basis of the 3 collections of his Itudes pour piano which are considered to be the most important piano music of the end of the 20th century. Gyvrgy Ligeti travelled a long road: from Romanian folk music and the tonal language of his fellow countryman Bila Bartsk to his own cosmos of sounds. The mentor of a whole generation of composers, he wanted to 'fuse the fear of death with laughter'. http://www.roomtemperature.org http://www.asullenrelapse.blogspot.com http://flickr.com/photos/55867717@N00/sets/ ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 04:09:47 -0700 (PDT) From: Wireviews Subject: [idealcopy] LOST LATER >> As for Lost, never watched it. Find it hard >> to get excited by current US drama series. > Mark - this is one of the very rare times when a > US show lives up to the hype. I remember watching the first four or five episodes at 5am, when we were suffering from extreme jet-lag after getting back from our honeymoon in the USA. The series was pretty gripping, but I think that has a lot to do with the simply excellent opening episode. For me, the remainder of the series was diminishing returns. The plot developments are glacially slow, and the fact that you could probably create a three-hour edit of the whole of season one and still not miss anything is rather indicative of Lost as a whole. As an exercise in quality character development, the show is excellent. As a show that's supposed to be entertaining and keep you wanting to see more, it could be a lot better. (I guess this is partly down to expectation, but I ended up getting really irritated with the constant flashbacks.) Rumour has it that Lost is planned to run over five seasons, and I'm not sure I can be bothered to wait it out, to be honest. (At present, we've not bothered with season two at all, although we might watch it if E4 does a "weekend of Lost", like it did just before the season one finale.) Horses for courses and all that... Craig - ------- Craig Grannell / Wireviews --- http://www.wireviews.com News, reviews and dugga. VMU: http://www.vmuonline.com SVA: http://www.snubcommunications.com - -------------- wireviews@yahoo.com --- Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 13:35:55 +0200 From: "Bart van Damme" Subject: Re: [idealcopy] Gyorgy Ligeti RIP I was expecting this mail from you Fergus! This morning I was reading an article on Ligeti and how he derived his micropolyphony from such diverse sources as Wagner, Bartok and (medieval/renaissance composers) Ockeghem and Thomas Tallis (you know... of 'Spam' in Alium). Like most people I came to know his works (e.g. Lux Aeterna) through the soundtrack of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think the film gained enormously from from Ligeti's otherworldly tunes. Apparently Ligeti even sued Kubrick over alterations to one of his work. So much for gratitude to introduce his "difficult" music to a larger audience... "What are you doing Dave?" Bart > Gyvrgy Ligeti has died on 12 June in Vienna. > > from: www.schott-music.com > > On Monday morning, the Austrian-Hungarian composer > Gyvrgy Ligeti died in Vienna at the age of 83 after > suffering from a serious illness. With him, we have > lost one of the greatest composers of the 20th > century. > > Gyvrgy Ligeti was an adventurer in form and expression > and a great visionary of contemporary music. His > richly varied output takes a special position in its > musical quality and uncompromising individuality. > Ligeti moved far away from aesthetic trends and > methods all his life. He was characterized by fresh > and unorthodox ideas, any form of dogmatism was > foreign to his nature, his entire oeuvre is marked by > radical turning points. Admired and hugely influential > in the profession, the sensual accessibility of his > music has won the hearts of audiences everywhere. > > Atmosphhres, the orchestral work he created in 1961, > made Ligeti instantly well-known. In this piece, he > worked almost completely without traditional melodic, > harmonic and rhythmic parameters and concentrated on > sounds with constantly changing textures. > Micropolyphony, he once described, means such a > dense tissue that the individual parts become > inaudible and only the resulting intermingling > harmonies are effective as a form'. For him, however, > techniques were never an end in themselves. Ligeti did > not keep long to iridescent tonal surfaces, but always > looked for new paths. > > His father and brother both died in concentration > camps; he himself managed to escape the labour service > of the Hungarian army in 1941 and had to flee to > Austria after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Deeply > affected by these events, he developed a strong > dislike of any dictatorship and any form of > intellectual restriction: 'I am an enemy of ideologies > in the arts. Totalitarian regimes do not like > dissonances.' Biochemistry, chaos research, fractal > geometry  Ligeti, who initially intended to study > physics, found inspiration in the natural world for > new compositional principles. During his long years as > a teacher of international repute, he encouraged the > independence, originality and uncompromising > self-criticism of his pupils: 'There is only one > tradition. Our music either stands up to it or not.' > > After his intensive work at the Studio f|r > elektronische Musik of the WDR in Cologne in the 1950s > and the development of micropolyphony in the 1960s, > his personal style became simpler and more transparent > in the 1970s. And as if wanting to withdraw from the > predominating musical tendencies, he began to use > tonal sounds again. Ligeti said: 'I no longer listen > to rules on what is to be regarded as modern and what > as old-fashioned.' His only full-length stage work Le > Grand Macabre was inspired by the theatre of the > absurd and is teeming with operetta-like wit and black > humour. The composer wanted to communicate more > directly with audiences: 'Stage action and music > should be dangerous and bizarre, absolutely > exaggerated, absolutely crazy.' > > In the 1980s and 1990s, Ligeti expanded his musical > horizons again, incorporating structural principles of > African drumming music into his works: the fanatic of > the intricate developed new complex polyrhythmic > techniques. They form the basis of the 3 collections > of his Itudes pour piano which are considered to be > the most important piano music of the end of the 20th > century. > > Gyvrgy Ligeti travelled a long road: from Romanian > folk music and the tonal language of his fellow > countryman Bila Bartsk to his own cosmos of sounds. > The mentor of a whole generation of composers, he > wanted to 'fuse the fear of death with laughter'. > > http://www.roomtemperature.org > http://www.asullenrelapse.blogspot.com > http://flickr.com/photos/55867717@N00/sets/ ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 10:12:41 -0400 From: "David McKenzie" Subject: Re: [idealcopy] Gyorgy Ligeti RIP Ligeti's music was HUGE in my experience. I have fond memories of clearing the record store at closing with a piece for 3 clarinets. He had an intuitive sense of the potential of beauty in dissonance unmatched by any. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 09:25:09 -0400 From: TnA Subject: [idealcopy] nu yawk hello, WIREmen (Few ladies here, I take it) nothing pithy to add to EDIT topic (never heard them, or of them 'till now), nor to LOST (barely heard of it, never seen it....although the wife and I grin regularly at Little Britain) merely a note wondering if there will be anything of interest to a WIRE type guy in NYC the week of july 3-7, as, due to circumstances beyond my control, I will be there, then. off list replies probably best idea thanks tim ------------------------------ End of idealcopy-digest V9 #158 *******************************