Twentieth-century Music

Week 7

György Ligeti, György Kurtág, Gerárd Grisey and Spectralism

Read

Paul Griffiths, Program Notes, György Kurtág, Kafka Fragments, Op. 24 (1985–1987).

György Ligeti, “György Ligeti interviews himself,” (1971), trans. Geoffrey Skelton, in Ligeti in Conversation with Péter Várnai, Josef Häusler, Claude Samuel and Himself (London: Eulenburg, 1983), 124–37.

Amy Bauer, Excerpt from Chapter 4 Ligeti’s Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011).

Joseph Auner, “Xenakis and Spectralism,” in Music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (NY: W. W. Norton, 2013), 243–46.

Amy Bauer, Liam Cagney and Will Mason, “excerpt from introduction, The Oxford Handbook on Spectral Music, edited by Bauer, Cagney and Mason (Oxford, 2023). 1–2.

Gérard Grisey, “Did you say spectral?,” trans; Joshua Fineberg, Contemporary Music Review , 19:3 (2000), 1–3.

Listening link and scores

Ligeti, Lontano or orchestra (1967)

Kurtág, Hommage à András Mihály 12 microludes for string quartet (1977–1978), I, II and V .

Kurtág, Kafka-Fragmente for soprano and violin op. 24, Pt I, 3, Versteckte.

Kurtág, Kafka-Fragmente Pt II, 4, Schmutzig, bin ich, Milená ...(1946–48).

Grisey, Partiels, mm. 1–23 (1976).

Other Composers in this period:

British: George Benjamin, Brian Ferneyhough

Canadian: Claude Vivier

Finnish: Magnus Lindberg

French: Hugues Dufourt