Six Bagatelles

Born in Transylvania in 1923, György Ligeti spent his life trying to push boundaries. He famously said, “I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape.” Whether or not you know Ligeti’s name, you may have heard his music if you’re a fan of director Stanley Kubrick. In the classic 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey , the choral work Lux aeterna accompanies several appearances of an alien monolith. In his final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Kubrick used a passage from Ligeti’s piano suite Musica ricercata. Written between 1951 and 1953, Musica ricercata drew on the Renaissance ricercar, an intellectual or academic composition. As he explained in 1968, Ligeti meant this in the truest sense:

In 1951, I started to experiment with simple structures of rhythm and sound in order, in a manner of speaking, to build up a new music from nothing. My method was Cartesian to the extent that I considered all the music which I already knew and loved as not binding on me—even as invalid. I asked myself: what can I do with a single note? what can I do with its octave? what with one interval? what with two intervals? What with definite rhythmic relationships which could form the foundation of a whole based on rhythm and interval? In this way several small pieces were composed, chiefly for piano.

Ligeti arranged six movements from Musica ricercata as the Six Bagatelles (short, whimsical pieces) for wind quintet. At the work’s 1956 premiere, the Hungarian government forbade the performance of the final movement as the result of its “dense chromaticism and frenzied expression.” Yet it is the fifth bagatelle that is perhaps the most striking. Titled “Béla Bartók; In Memoriam,” the movement is Ligeti’s homage to a fellow Hungarian and composer whose music he much admired.