drott kyrie

LINE, MASSES, MICROPOLYPHONY:LIGETI’S KYRIE AND THE“CRISIS OF THE FIGURE”

ERIC DROTT

N AN ESSAY published in 1965, the critic Heinz-Klaus Metzger bluntly asserted that “good melodies can no longer be written.”1 That

Metzger would arrive at such a stark, pessimistic appraisal of the melodic figure’s status in contemporary music is surprising and somewhat ironic. He had long been a staunch advocate of the postwar musical avant-garde, acting as something of an in-house intellectual for the Darmstadt circle in the 1950s. Yet his comments, a decade removed from the heroic years of the Darmstadt school, recalled nothing so much as the sort of complaint that critics hostile to new music had often lodged against this repertoire: that having broken with certain conventions of Western art music, avant-garde composers had broken with immutable laws of aesthetic value; that these same composers had contented themselves in creating works that were

I

2 Perspectives of New Music

a-melodic at best, and anti-melodic at worst; and that even if one were to admit that atonal music “can no doubt be sung, given time and patience,” the fact of the matter was that “the results will scarcely please.”2 But in contrast to such familiar critical tropes, Metzger’s claim that “good melodies” had grown scarce since the advent of atonality was not to be construed as a value judgment on new music. Rather it was the assertion of a historical fact, one whose social and historical implications needed to be confronted. The jagged lines that abound in the twelve-tone compositions of Schoenberg were not, in Metzger’s eyes, “a matter of ineptness, . . . a mistake on Schoenberg’s part” but represented the composer’s unflinching response to “an objective, historically reached, irreversible situation within the material dimension of music.”3 Metzger’s position here and elsewhere in the essay betrays a clear debt to the aesthetic theory of his former teacher, Theodor Adorno, especially in his contention that the renunciation of familiar tokens of beauty assumes a socio-political import. A simple moral calculus is at work in this argument, so that what appears to be an artistic defect is converted, by means of the critical function that it performs, into a social good. The renunciation of ‘singing’ melodies thus transforms into a quasi-ethical obligation, whereas the attempt to continue writing such figures would constitute an act of ideological deception, one that would mask the real ugliness of society as it exists behind a comforting illusion of aesthetic beauty.

Metzger’s article betrays a debt to Adorno’s thought in a more concrete way as well. In recounting the historical bases for the ‘crisis of the figure,’ Metzger both draws from and expands upon the discussion of twelve-tone melody in Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. In tonal music, Metzger observes, the composition of melodic lines is constrained by the hierarchical nature of the tonal system as it is inscribed in the diatonic scale. This means that the ‘emancipation of dissonance’ liberates linear gestures at the same time as it releases dissonant sonorities from the obligation to resolve: “so with Schoenberg, with so-called free atonality, the figure became auto-nomous: in its melodic as well as in its harmonic aspect.”4 But the disavowal of tonality deprives figures of that which had furnished them with a sense of purpose and “substantiality.” The upshot of this, according to Metzger, is that the melodic freedom provided by atonality risks slipping into arbitrariness, into mere caprice:

It is as though the emancipated musical figure, borne along by no pre-conceived system whatsoever, is no longer—in the Hegelian sense—‘substantial’: the isolated figures, freed from every heteron-

Ligeti's Kyrie and the “Crisis of the Figure” 3

omy, constructed purely in themselves, are transformed. . . . [They become] ornamental in effect, and it does not seem that they should be of any greater value than trills, mordents and turns.5

The subsequent adoption of the twelve-tone technique by Schoenberg and his followers may be read as an attempt to create a durable system that would restore the sense of necessity that had been lost with the abandonment of tonal convention, and in this way make figures assume a semblance of “substantiality” once again. Yet the postwar extension of the twelve-tone principle to encompass parameters other than pitch, and the ensuing collapse of integral serialism in Europe, appeared to have dashed the hope that was placed in dodecaphony as a way of overcoming the ‘crisis of the figure.’

At the time of the essay’s writing, in the mid-1960s, Metzger discerned two main lines of development coming out of the serial impasse. The first was to continue the disaggregation of the line that the Klangfarbenmelodien of Webern had initiated, and that the pointillism of the post-Webernian serialists (such as Goeyvaerts and Nono) had further advanced. The increasingly exaggerated discontinuities in register, dynamics, and timbre characteristic of this particular trajectory had the effect of impairing listeners’ capacity to conjoin successive events into a coherent whole. According to Metzger, the culmination of this line of development was to be found in the work of Cage, whose use of chance techniques, heterogeneous sound sources, and long, unbroken silences impeded acts of synthetic perception.6 By contrast, the second tendency Metzger identified did not dissolve melodies into their constituent elements so much as conceal their presence to listeners:

In contemporary music of the most contrasting orientations, attempts to hide the very figures which compose the musical tex-ture itself are increasingly common. As if ashamed of their melodies, composers lay so many of them on top of one another, in so many different tempos, that they can no longer be heard in a concrete or satisfactory fashion.7

What Metzger is clearly alluding to in this passage is the ‘textural’ music of the 1960s and—more specifically—the micropolyphonic technique that György Ligeti had developed a few years beforehand.8

Used episodically in Apparitions (second movement, mm. 24–35) and Atmosphères (mm. 44–54), micropolyphony soon became a staple of Ligeti’s middle-period work, playing a central role in the Requiem,


Lux Aeterna, Lontano, and the Chamber Concerto. In these and other micropolyphonic pieces, the circulation of independent voices within a narrow ambitus produces a masking effect, the overlapping of parts interfering with their segregation into distinct streams. Individual threads become difficult to discern and, as a result, merge into a fused fabric. Or, as Ligeti put it, “. . . you cannot actually hear the polyphony, the canon. You hear a kind of impenetrable texture, something like a very densely woven cobweb.”9

The subsumption of the individual voice into a larger, fused group in Ligeti’s micropolyphonic music clearly aligns this style with the general anti-figural trend that Metzger sketches in his essay. Yet the status of the individual line in micropolyphony is ambiguous, remaining an active component of the texture even as it is removed from direct perception.10 This relationship, with all the paradoxes it entails, has long fascinated writers on Ligeti’s music. Central to this fascination is the proliferation of dialectical reversals to which micropolyphony gives rise, as it moves back and forth between a number of binary oppositions without ever coming to settle onone term or another. Simplicity/complexity, individual/mass, audibility/inaudibility, stasis/dynamism—these are but a few of the dialectically-entwined pairs commonly invoked in connection to Ligeti’s micropolyphony. For Jane Clendinning, the device offers a productive analogy to Schenkerian conceptions of musical structure, in which events taking place on the musical surface prove to be governed by layers that are “not readily audible.”11 For Jonathan Bernard it functions as a means by which the unfolding of musical structures in pitch space may be regulated.12 For Alastair Williams it pushes the Adornian idea of music’s “pseudomorphosis of painting” to its limit, so that the virtual spatialization of musical time engenders its opposite, a heightened awareness of temporality.13 And for Amy Bauer it epitomizes Ligeti’s ironic stance towards musical tradition, in that it transforms an altogether conventional device (canon) into a generator of unconventional musical textures.14 Metzger was hardly insensible to the dialectical play at work in micropolyphonic textures, arguing that the efficacy of the technique lay in its ability to suggest the presence of individual lines even as it withheld them from the listener. The success of micropolyphony, he writes, “owes itself to an indistinct mode of hearing, one which does not correctly penetrate the thing.”15 He compares this to the late paintings of Jackson Pollock, whose dense, overlapping textures can lead to a similar impression that the viewer is hampered by an “inexact apperception.”16 In both cases, Metzger argues, it is unclear whether the inability to discern the work’s


constituent figures resides in object or subject, in the work itself or in some deficiency in the listener’s faculties. In this respect Metzger’s argument hearkens back to eighteenth-century notions of the sublime, in which a momentary failure of the individual’s cognitive capacities produces an aesthetic frisson. Vital to this way of conceiving micropolyphony is the fact that lines, figures and melodies do not disappear from this variety of textural music, but are ubiquitous. It simply is that the effect of this ubiquity is to place any particular figure just beyond the listener’s grasp. One is aware of their continuing presence; it is just that one cannot actually hear any single voice for more than a fleeting moment.

While Metzger’s talk of a “crisis” of melodic writing may seem hyperbolic, his argument nonetheless captures something of the symbolic force inherent to micropolyphony. This is particularly evident in the Kyrie movement of Ligeti’s Requiem (1963–1965), the first of his works to use micropolyphony as a means of shaping an entire movement. Several factors distinguish the Kyrie from Ligeti’s later forays in micropolyphonic writing. The most notable is the greater intensity of rhythmic and melodic activity that characterizes the individual parts within the Kyrie. The texture produced by the massed lines in this movement exhibit a greater degree of ‘roughness’ than subsequent micropolyphonic works, such as Lontano or Lux Aeterna. This, in conjunction of the apocalyptic character of the text that the work sets, explains the heavy allegorical burden the Kyrie movement has acquired over the course of its reception history. Its multitude of voices has been likened at one point or another to:

– a mob;17

– the atomized individuals of industrial, urban society;18 – the faceless masses of totalitarian regimes;19 and– the “immeasurable tide of imploring humanity.”20

It is not difficult to grasp the logic behind these interpretations. If the voice is taken to be a signifier of the individual subject, then its absorption into a complex sonority will naturally come to be seen as representing deindividuation—though the particular meaning ascribed to this deindividuation varies considerably, being a function of a given author’s socio-historical position, her/his ideological commitments, and the particular institutional setting in which the act of interpretation takes place. But despite their variability, there are common themes that recur time and again in hermeneutic accounts of the Kyrie movement. The long-standing, mythopoetic status attached


to the human voice as a marker of (self-)presence within the Western art music tradition—and within Western metaphysics more generally—is crucial in this regard. The curious status of the individual vocal parts in the Kyrie, simultaneously present and absent, cannot help but assume a symbolic charge for listeners steeped in this tradition’s aesthetic and philosophical discourses.21

In the remainder of this article I will explore one particular site where the dramatic character of micropolyphony manifests itself in the Kyrie. As noted above, the movement is exceptional among Ligeti’s middle-period works for the high level of melodic and rhythmic activity that characterizes the individual parts, a fact which ensures that their assimilation into the overall texture is neither continuous nor complete. Although this does not prevent the piece from exhibiting many of the normative stylistic traits of micropolyphony, it is nonetheless the case that the constituent parts of the texture are at times more clearly audible here than elsewhere. Or, to be more precise, their perceptibility fluctuates over the course of the movement, with certain voices managing briefly to emerge from the background before receding back into the mass once again. By examining the interplay of emergence and subsumption of individual parts, I hope to show how the friction generated out of this interplay affords the various allegorical readings of the movement listed above, including Metzger’s “crisis of the figure.” “Affordance” is here understood in the sense proposed by J. J. Gibson, and as subsequently adopted and modified by music scholars such as Allan Moore, Tia DeNora, and Nicholas Cook: as the assortment of material attributes and structural properties of an artefact that permit for a range of potentially legitimate interpre-tations.22 The particular configuration of properties that one attends to, and the potential reading that is realized as a result, is in turn a function of the specific conditions of the artefact’s reception and the dispositions of its users. The point is therefore not to offer yet another hermeneutic account of the movement, but to explore the conditions of possibility for such accounts. I begin by considering the stylistic and structural features of the lines themselves, in order to isolate some of the immanent factors that either encourage or discourage their emergence from the overall texture. In doing so, my analysis draws freely—and in an admittedly unsystematic manner—from the extensive literature on auditory streaming, the process whereby individuals segregate a succession of musical events into a number of distinct percepts. I then turn to the interaction between various moments of emergence and the evolution of the textural mass as a whole, to see what role the arrangement of the parts—or more specifically, the


distribution of their various peaks across the movement—plays in this process. Finally, I return to the question of the work’s interpretation at the end of the article, where I draw upon research on musical gesture to recast some of the issues raised over the course of the analysis. In particular, I explore how the treatment of the constituent parts of the micropolyphonic fabric constrains the kinds of mimetic relationships that musical works have traditionally afforded audiences, and what impact this may have on the experience of the Kyrie.

* * *

Ligeti’s truncated Requiem comprises just four sections of the text of the traditional Requiem mass: the Introit, Kyrie, De Die Judicii Sequenza, and Lacrimosa. The second movement, the Kyrie, represents the most extensive exploration of the micropolyphonic technique in the entire work, and in Ligeti’s œuvre to that point in his career. The movement is a double fugue, with one subject accompanying the words “Kyrie Eleison,” the other the words “Christe Eleison” (these are shown in Examples 1A and 1B, respectively). The various subject entries are distributed among the five choral sections, each of which is further subdivided into four individual parts, creating what Ligeti described as “bundles” of voices.23 This divisi treatment of the chorus allows each subject entry of the fugue to be performed additionally as a four-part canon, nesting a micropolyphonic structure within the large-scale fugal architecture. As for the movement’s form, there are at least two (and perhaps three) ways one might conceive of the work’s overall organization. Considered poietically, in terms of its underlying fugal architecture, the movement may be seen as possessing a large-scale bipartite structure. There are twenty-three statements of the Kyrie and Christe themes over the course of the movement, whose initial notes are reinforced and sustained by various orchestral doublings. These entries are shown in Example 2 (note that the tenors and altos both begin the initial statements of the Kyrie and Christe subjects on the same pitch, Bb3, which explains why only twenty-two distinct entries are present in the example given). As can be gleaned from Example 2—and as quite a few writers on this movement have noted—the first twelve entries form a twelve-tone series, which turns out to be the same series used for the basic form of the Christe subject. And as Jonathan Bernard has demonstrated in his examination of the sketches for the movement, the final twelve entries are a distorted retrograde inversion of the same row (See Example 3).24 Given this underlying


scheme, it is reasonable to suppose that entries 11 and 12 (mm. 44–64 and mm. 45–66, respectively) bisect the movement, dividing it into two roughly equal and symmetrically-related parts.25

If we instead consider the movement esthesically, in terms of its phenomenal attributes, a tripartite design emerges.26 This way of parsing the music is a function of changes in the overall volume of the sound mass produced by the fugue, along with the level of rhythmic activity within it. The music first undergoes a broad registral expansion, coupled with an increase in rhythmic activity and dynamic level, reaching its climax with the soprano entry in mm. 40–52. The sound mass then subsides (mm. 52–60), leading to the middle section

EXAMPLE 1A: KYRIE LINE, ALTO 1, MM. 1–21

EXAMPLE 1B: CHRISTE LINE, MEZZO-SOPRANO LINE, MM. 13–28


of the movement, where the women’s parts dominate, each singing a version of the Christe subject (mm. 60–79). Throughout this portion of the work the cluster occupies a narrower band of pitch-space and is performed at a generally softer dynamic, providing a contrast with the framing sections of the movement (Ulrich Dibelius likens this to the contrasting ‘Christe’ section of traditional Kyrie settings).27 Then,

EXAMPLE 2: CANON ENTRIES

EXAMPLE 3: DERIVATION OF CANON ENTRIES FROM ROW (AFTER BERNARD)


beginning in m. 92, the music ‘recapitulates’ the opening gesture, combining a registral expansion with peaks in dynamic level and rhythmic activity.28 A third possible interpretation is to hear it as unfolding a single, unbroken gesture. In a way, this reading of the movement is simply a recasting of the tripartite reading, albeit one that stresses the absence of clear sectional breaks. From this perspective, the three sections described above would not be construed as distinct entities so much as the phases of a complex dynamic envelope.

In addition to the Kyrie, two other movements of the Requiem feature micropolyphony. In the Introit, the micropolyphonic passages are broken up into short textural blocks, each defined in terms of registral position, ambitus and vocal group. Overall, the atmosphere is muted: there are no tutti, and the dynamic level never exceeds pianissimo. The fourth and final movement, the Lacrimosa, returns to this same hushed ambiance, but pushes the thinning of the texture further than the Introit. The only voices present are those of the soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists (accompanied by the orchestra), echoing the passage from the opening movement (mm. 50–66) that introduced the two soloists as distinct musical agents, independent of the choral mass. (The De Die Judicii Sequentia is exceptional within the Requiem, written in the “hyperexpressionistic” style Ligeti had first explored in Aventures. The contrast provided by the third movement thus provides something of a release-valve for the tension that has accumulated over the course of the Kyrie, with the fantastic and lurid imagery of Thomas de Celano’s text matched by the wild gesticu-lations of the soloists, choir and orchestra.)29 The appearance of the two soloists in the framing movements of the Requiem plays a crucial role in shaping how the micropolyphonic textures heard elsewhere in the work are construed. The duet, first heard in the Introit and subsequently revisited in the Lacrimosa, offers the listener a momentary glimpse of that which is otherwise obscured in the rest of the work. The relative transparency of these two moments, in other words, make audible the lines that constitute the denser micropolyphonic textures of the Kyrie. But what is perhaps the most striking trait of these lines is their overall lack of striking or memorable traits. The lines do not possess strongly delineated melodic contours or rhythmic patterns, but are defined through the presence of generic, statistical characteristics. Consider the soprano and mezzo duet beginning in m. 50 of the Introit, shown in Example 4. Both parts move strictly by half- or whole-step, and remain within a narrow band of pitch-space (the soprano outlines a tritone, from B3 to F4, while the mezzo-soprano outlines a minor sixth, from A#3 to F#4). On account of the frequent changes of direction at the note-to-note level, the


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voices possess a meandering quality. Although both do in fact trace a steady ascent through pitch-space over their total span, at the local level motion in a single direction is rarely sustained beyond two or three notes, robbing the lines of a strong sense of goal-directed motion.30 Finally, the length and irregular duration of the individual notes—only one is shorter than a half-note, at the tempo of q = 60—makes it difficult to hear a consistent pulse in the lines. The combination of these factors produces lines that, while idiosyncratic in stylistic terms, fail to project strongly individuated Gestalts. Absent a distinctive shape that might throw them into relief, the soprano and mezzo-soprano parts appear as if expressly designed to fade into the musical background.

In laying bare the constituent lines of the micropolyphonic fabric, the soprano/mezzo duet of the Introit at the same time lays bare the degree to which the immanent musical characteristics of these lines actively contribute to their subsequent absorption into the Kyrie’s sound mass. What this momentary glimpse of the constituent threads of the micropolyphonic fabric reveal to the listener is that the fusion of individual parts in the Kyrie is not simply a function of their accretion, nor of their arrangement into registrally overlapping bundles. Rather, it is as much a product of the lines’ melodic, rhythmic, and dynamic attributes. Here the ample literature on auditory streaming may help clarify to what degree the fusion of line—or, conversely, their perceptual segregation—is attributable either to the structure of the lines themselves, or to their disposition in pitch-space. Among the factors impeding the segregation of lines one may cite:

– the number of voices present in a given passage (the more voices, the more difficult it is to discern individual parts);31

– the degree of timbral homogeneity (the more homogeneous the timbres, the greater the tendency of different parts to fuse);32

– the degree of registral overlap (voices that cross frequently will be harder to distinguish);33

– the level of synchronization between parts (attacks that coincide result in a greater degree of fusion);34 and

– differences in dynamic level (the greater the equilibrium between voices, the less likely any individual part will be clearly perceptible).35

In addition to these factors—which largely pertain to the relationships formed between voices—one may also enumerate characteristics immanent to individual lines that encourage either their perceptual


segregation or their fusion into a composite texture:

– pitch proximity (the closer successive notes in pitch-space, the more likely they will form a perceptually distinct stream);36

– pitch trajectory (parts that exhibit directed motion are more likely to be perceived as discrete percepts);37 and

– temporal proximity (the closer together successive attacks, the more likely they are to form a distinct stream).38

To be sure, the two sets of factors listed above do not act in isolation of one another, but are interdependent. For instance, the overlapping of separate parts in micropolyphonic textures will have a significant effect on perceptions of pitch and temporal proximity, which will in turn determine which streams the listener is able to pick out of the overall texture. This is made clear by the soprano/mezzo-soprano duet in the Introit. Because the two parts occupy the same narrow ambitus, their successive attacks interleave. The temporal proximity of attacks originating in two different voices confounds to a certain extent the listener’s ability to separate the voices into two perceptually distinct streams. The same is also true with regard to pitch: registral overlap ensures a high degree of pitch proximity across the two voices, thereby facilitating their fusion into a single stream (though of course countervailing factors—in particular, the relative sparseness of the texture—help the listener to distinguish the voices). Here as elsewhere the question of whether voices emerge out of the total texture or are absorbed into it depends in large part upon the interaction of these two sets of determinants, of the immanent characteristics of the lines and their distribution within the broader musical texture. Far from being simply a matter of the quantity of voices involved, or their arrangement in pitch space, the subsumption of individual parts in the Kyrie depends in equal measure on the design of the lines themselves. Hence, in order to understand why individual lines emerge from the sound mass at some moments and disappears into it at others, it is necessary to examine the two fugue subjects used in the Kyrie in greater detail.

THE KYRIE SUBJECT

The intervallic structure of the material that accompanies the text “Kyrie Eleison” remains fairly constant over the course of the movement. All twelve entries are related by either transposition or


inversion; and because Ligeti applies these operations to the succession of pitch intervals, the overall contour of the Kyrie lines is preserved in either its original or inverted form through its various iterations.39 The rhythmic and dynamic profiles of the Kyrie entries are more variable, though each follows the same basic outline: a steady acceleration followed by a deceleration of the pulse, concurrent with a gradual crescendo followed by a decrescendo. Comparison of the Kyrie subject to the micropolyphonic lines presented in the Introit reveals some key differences: most obviously, at 112 notes the Kyrie subject is much longer than the soprano and mezzo-soprano lines of the preceding movement. In addition, the pacing of the various statements of the Kyrie subject is much quicker. This may be seen in Example 1A. While each statement of the Kyrie subject possesses a distinct rhythmic setting, the alto line given in the example is nonetheless characteristic. Furthermore, there is a greater sense of directed motion present at the local level in the Kyrie statements (at times as many as six notes proceed in the same direction before the line reverses direction).

Still, notable similarities exist between the Kyrie subject and the Introit lines. As was the case with the soprano and mezzo-soprano lines heard in the first movement, the Kyrie subject consists entirely of whole- and half-steps. There are no leaps. Likewise, there are few abrupt changes in durational value, at least at the local, note-to-note level. While there is a written-out accelerando/decelerando that spans the entirety of the Kyrie subject, change in rhythmic activity takes place gradually, with few sudden shifts from longer to shorter note values (and vice-versa).40 Given the importance of discontinuity to segmentation, the almost total lack of what Lerdahl and Jackendoff refer to as “distinctive transitions” in the domains of pitch or rhythm renders it difficult to parse the Kyrie line into smaller, memorable chunks.41 The only domain that does facilitate the line’s segmentation is contour, though this proves insufficient to the task of delineating discrete figures. Furthermore, the frequent reversals of direction, along with the lack of repeated contour patterns within the line itself, hamper the ability of this parameter to project clearly articulated segments. No less than the lines that comprised the vocal duet of the Introit, the immanent characteristics of the Kyrie subject resist segmentation into the kind of discrete figures that might stand out in relief against the textural ground.

But if the Kyrie subject fails to generate discrete, discernible shapes at a local level, at a global level such a shape emerges out of the evolution of the subject itself. The accumulation of statistical peaks in the domains of pitch, rhythm, and dynamics produces a distinctive


contour, one that characterizes the Kyrie line in its entirety. Again, the opening alto statement of the Kyrie subject is representative. The line traces a continuous, stepwise arch, descending from Bb3 to F#3 in measure 3, then rising in staggered waves to B4 in measure 13. After reaching this melodic highpoint, it descends to its final pitch, C4. Example 5A provides a graphic representation of the Alto 1’s contour through this entire passage. Concurrent with this melodic contour are correlated arches in terms of rhythm and dynamics. The pace of the melody begins slowly, gradually speeds up towards the highpoint of B4, and slows down again toward its end. This process is represented in Example 5B. Likewise, the dynamic level begins pianissimo, crescendos to mezzopiano in measure 13, and then returns to pianissimo by measure 18 (shown in Example 5C).42 Taken together, these factors clearly stress the B4 in measure 13 as a peak, as is shown in Example 5D, which combines the graphs from Examples 5A, 5B and 5C into a single composite representation of the initial Kyrie statement.

While the graph in Example 5D provides a reasonably accurate picture of the unfolding of the Alto 1 part, the microcanonic relationship between this voice and the other Alto parts blurs the resulting contour. This is particularly apparent in connection to the climactic B4. Instead of there being a single, culminating moment, what one hears is a staggered wave of climaxes, as each successive alto voice reaches the B4 before receding back into the sound mass. The micropolyphony, in other words, has the effect of ‘smudging’ the climax, such as it is represented in Example 5D. But in a curious way, the series of melodic peaks that stretch across mm. 13–14 facilitates the emergence of a discrete, clearly perceptible stream from out of the sound mass. Temporal and pitch proximity between successive melodic peaks plays a key role here, as does dynamic level. The fact that the pitches all fall within a fairly narrow registral band, and succeed one another in rapid succession, makes it likely that the listener will connect these melodic high-points together to form a single, virtual stream. The same basic process holds for succeeding Kyrie entries, all of which surge forth from the texture at an analogous spot in their unfolding, and all of which feature a similar staggering of the climactic pitch across the individual voices of a ‘bundle.’ (A particularly marked instance of this effect comes just after the first climax of the work, in mm. 54–58, when the successive peaks in the tenors’ and basses’ Kyrie lines create what Ulrich Dibelius evocatively describes as a series of “aftershocks.”)43 The propensity of the Kyrie lines to generate virtual streams that protrude from the texture at this point is further


heightened in subsequent entries, as each successive dynamic peak grows in intensity relative to those that came before, creating a large-scale arch in terms of dynamic level.

EXAMPLE 5A: CONTOUR (KYRIE, ALTO 1, M. 1 FF.; C3 = 0)

EXAMPLE 5B: ATTACKS PER MEASURE (KYRIE, ALTO 1, M. 1 FF.)


THE CHRISTE SUBJECT

The organization of the Christe subject, and the transformations that it undergoes, are more complicated than those witnessed in connection with the Kyrie subject. As noted above, the Christe material is based on a twelve-tone row. According to Bernard, the sketches for the Requiem show the row presented in Example 3 to be its basic form (identified on the manuscript as the Grundtypus).44 On occasion, the twelve-tone basis of the Christe lines is made readily apparent: one such instance comes in m. 29 with the basses’ entry, which presents a complete I2 form of the row, followed by its retrograde (this can be

EXAMPLE 5C: DYNAMICS (KYRIE, ALTO 1, M. 1 FF.)

EXAMPLE 5D: COMPOSITE GRAPH (KYRIE, ALTO 1, M. 1 FF.)


seen in Example 6). For the most part, however, the underlying twelve-tone structure of the Christe lines is obscured by the various transformations to which the row is subject. As a result, the relationship that obtains between the various Christe melodies appearing in the movement is not one of identity, but of family resemblance. This sets them apart from the Kyrie lines, which preserves the same contour under transposition and inversion.

What, then, are the characteristics shared by the various members of the Christe family? At least three may be identified. First, the Christe melodies are generally less active rhythmically than the Kyrie lines, moving at a more measured pace. Second, the Christe lines all tend to be arrayed as wedge contours, as can be seen in Examples 1B, 3, and 6 above. Such contours are a mainstay of Ligeti’s music, and hearken back at least as far as the chromatic fugue that served as the finale to his Musica ricercata of 1953, whose subject bears a striking resem-blance to the basic form of the Christe row. In general, these wedges open out, creating registral or pitch-space expansions. (There are two significant exceptions to this pattern, one of which is the afore-mentioned bass entry in m. 29; I will discuss both these moments at greater length below.) Finally, the Christe lines tend to string together short segments of the row followed by the retrogrades of these segments, creating chains of palindromic pitch formations. Although perfectly symmetrical lines are rare (the only two being the mezzo-soprano line in m. 13 ff. and the bass line in m. 29 ff.), virtually all of the Christe lines embed shorter, internally symmetrical segments.45

The Christe lines thus feature symmetry in both horizontal and vertical dimensions, though these operate on different levels of the musical structure. The vertical symmetry exhibited by the wedge contours is situated at a background level, rarely perceptible as such; and this is in large part on account of the accumulation of horizontal symmetries at a more surface level. Consider the Christe line that the tenors present at the beginning of the movement (see Example 7,

EXAMPLE 6: BASS, CHRISTE LINE, M. 29 FF.


which presents both the tenor line and the row from which it derives). As can be seen in the example, the line pursues a circuitous path through the RI5 form of the row. It commences by advancing through the first four O.N.s, but upon reaching G# it switches back and returns, via retrograde motion, to its point of departure, Bb. At this point the forward progress through the row starts over, this time managing to reach F# (O.N. 7) before doubling back again. However, the retrograde motion is itself cut short, so that the line, having reached B# (O.N. 4), reverses direction one final time. One way of visualizing this linear motion is as a path that zig-zags back and forth through the order numbers of the row (see Example 8). Note, however, that each time the melodic path doubles back on itself, the further the music as heard is removed from the underlying row. The greater the number of palindromic segments inserted into the Christe line, the more the row structure is transformed from an audible presence into an inaudible, background generator of pitch material.

The zig-zagging itinerary traced by the tenors is characteristic of the Christe melodies. The choice of which particular row form to use, as well as the particular path taken through its O.N.s, varies from one statement to the next. It is these sorts of choices, however, that determine the resulting shape of the various Christe lines, as well as the capacity of these lines (or their subsegments) to either fuse with or emerge from the sound mass. Since the rows that underlie the Christe lines typically take the form of registral expansions, the pitch intervals increase in size as the row progresses. There is a rough correlation, in other words, of pitch interval size and order number: Christe lines whose palindromic segments circulate around O.N.s 0–5 will generally feature smaller pitch intervals, and thus a greater amount of conjunct motion, while those that circulate around O.N.s 6–11 will feature larger pitch intervals, and thus a greater amount of disjunct motion.

EXAMPLE 7: DERIVATION OF CHRISTE LINE, TENOR 1, M. 1 FF.


These characteristics appear to inform where and how specific Christe lines are deployed across the movement. During the opening (up tom. 60), the zig-zagging paths taken through the various row forms are weighted toward the first six to eight O.N.s. Such is the case with the tenor line discussed above, which only reaches O.N. 8 after repeatedly looping back through earlier portions of the row. A similar process takes place in the alto line that begins in m. 23. As Example 9 shows, each time the line pushes forward to reach a new O.N. in the series, it pulls back, retracing its steps before moving on. As a result, the size of the pitch intervals within the line increases only gradually, and the line as a whole (as well as the tenor line beginning in m. 1) features less disjunct motion than would have been the case had it proceeded directly through the row’s O.N.s. This way of spinning out the underlying row structure has important consequences for the perceptibility of the resulting lines. Given that disjunct motion is more likely to stand out against a relatively homogeneous texture, creating a marked contrast with the conjunct linear motion that prevails in the movement, the systematic curtailment of such motion in the realization of these and other Christe lines impedes their ability to project out of the sound mass. While the wedge contours of the Christe row possess the potential to generate perceptually distinct streams, this potential is actualized only rarely.

EXAMPLE 8: PATH THROUGH ORDER NUMBERS, TENORS, M. 1 FF.(Y-AXIS SHOWS ORDER NUMBERS OF CHRISTE SUBJECT;

X-AXIS SHOWS SUCCESSIVE NOTES OF TENOR LINE)


In contrast to the opening, the three Christe melodies that make up the bulk of the middle section all feature a greater amount of disjunct motion. These lines, sung by sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, and altos, share a similar morphology: after an initial statement of the complete row, each line then runs through a series of palindromic segments of decreasing length, with O.N. 11 serving as one of the axes around which the shortening segments pivot. It is as if this endpoint were a gravitational pole toward which the vocalists were attracted. Examples 10A and 10B shows this process as it unfolds in the mezzo-sopranos’ part. But unlike the Christe melodies in the opening section, the embedded palindromes here move within the space marked out by the row’s second hexachord, which means that pitch intervals larger than a tritone prevail within the resulting lines. Oddly enough, however, the disjunct motion thereby produced does not serve to distinguish the lines from the textural ground, as might be expected (and this in spite of the fact that virtually all of the notes are slightly accented as a result of the vocal leaps they require). That this is the case is due in large part to the perceptual segregation of the individual lines into a number of separate streams. Consider the mezzo-soprano line as it is rewritten in Example 11. The proximity of pitches in two distinct registral regions (one located around middle C, the other roughly a minor sixth above, around Ab4) overrides their common origin within the same vocal part, producing a compound melody as a result. This perceptual segregation

EXAMPLE 9: PATH THROUGH ORDER NUMBERS, ALTOS, M. 23 FF.(Y-AXIS SHOWS ORDER NUMBERS OF CHRISTE SUBJECT;

X-AXIS SHOWS SUCCESSIVE NOTES OF ALTO LINE)


EX

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of the line into two separate streams is further abetted by the microcanonic relationship between them. The increased rate at which notes occupying the same region of pitch-space succeed one another contributes to this effect, as registrally proximate pitches are passed from one voice to another, creating flickering bands of sound.

Once the initial expansion of the wedge contour is complete, the distinct streams that emerge out of the individual Christe lines inm. 60 ff. rarely exceed the span of a minor third. This continues to be the case for the entirety of the middle section. But with the onset of the final section (marked by the soprano’s Kyrie entry in m. 79), the virtual streams dissolve, their conjunct motion giving way to the disjunct motion of the actual vocal lines. A change in orchestration is key to this effect. Up to this point, the Christe lines sung by the sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, and altos are doubled by the violins and violas. This neutralizes timbre as a factor in the formation of streams: the fact that the voices are not strongly differentiated in terms of orchestration means that pitch proximity is the main factor in allocating notes to separate parts. At m. 79, however, woodwinds replace the strings in doubling the alto and mezzo-soprano’s voice bundles (both of which continue into the beginning of the third section of the movement). This change in orchestration introduces timbre as a factor that interferes with—and ultimately supersedes—pitch proximity in the formation of auditory streams.46 As a result, the note-to-note succession within the individual lines outweighs the registral connections created between non-adjacent notes in terms of salience. Whereas the (virtual) conjunct motion created by the streaming of voices had hitherto neutralized the potentially disruptive force of the lines’ (real) disjunct motion, now the jagged contour of these lines becomes more clearly audible. This is especially so with the parts doubled by the oboe, whose timbre cuts through the orchestral

EXAMPLE 11: STREAMING OF MEZZO-SOPRANO LINES, M. 60 FF.


sonority. The sudden emergence of the lines at this point seems to release pent-up energy, triggering a rapid crescendo that breaks off—“wie abgerissen”—in m. 83.

Moments where voice parts emerge from out of the micropoly-phonic texture—as is the case with mezzo-sopranos in mm. 79–83—are surprisingly rare among the Christe lines, considering the amount of disjunct motion that their underlying wedge contours contain. As the foregoing has indicated, however, Ligeti generally takes care to deploy the Christe lines in such a way that their ‘sharp edges’ are blunted, either by using embedded palindromes to adjust the pro-portion of conjunct to disjunct motion, or by arranging the lines in a way that encourages the streaming of literally disjunct figures into phe-nomenally conjunct ones. The breakdown in the streaming that takes place in m. 79 thus marks one of the few moments where these mechanisms fail—mechanisms which otherwise succeed in preventing the disjunctions inherent to the Christe subject from piercing the texture. Yet there are still other Christe entries that effect more salient ruptures in the Kyrie’s texture. The two most significant of these occur in the sopranos, first in mm. 40–52 and again beginning in m. 102. Taken together, these two entries mark the dual climaxes of the movement. Apart from the purely ‘statistical’ factors that set these passages apart (both represent registral high points in the movement, as well as moments of maximal intensity, in terms of both dynamics and textural density), long-range structural processes contribute to their sense of culmination. Most notably, they are the only two Christe lines that do not display any internal horizontal symmetry. Or at least this appears to be the case when they are considered individually; taken as a pair, they form a large-scale, quasi-palindromic line spanning the movement (Example 12). In this regard, the melody in m. 102 acquires something of a syntactic function: by restoring the equilibrium that the asymmetrical soprano line had disrupted some fifty measures earlier, it closes a gesture that had been left hanging in suspense.

The soprano lines in m. 40 ff. and m. 102 ff. are striking for other reasons. Both are among the few moments in the movement where complete, uninterrupted statements of the Christe row are presented, the other two occurring in the basses in mm. 29–41. Whereas else-where in the Kyrie movement the twelve-tone basis of the Christe lines is obscured by the circuitous path taken in traversing the row, in these passages the ‘hidden’ twelve-tone structure is brought to the surface. Equally significant is the fact that the soprano entry in m. 102, along with the bass entry in m. 29, represent the only two occasions where


the wedge contours characteristic of the Christe lines reverse direction. Here—and here alone—registral expansion gives way to registral contraction. With regard to the bass entry in m. 29, the contraction that sets the I2 form of the row is immediately answered by its exact retrograde, an expansion that sets the RI2 form of the row. The result is a symmetrical, ‘decrescendo-crescendo’ contour (><). The soprano entries in m. 40 and m. 102 likewise exhibit a symmetrical relationship, but here an expansion is followed by a contraction, creating a more rounded, less open-ended ‘crescendo-decrescendo’ contour (<>).

While the foregoing underlines the strong structural correlation linking the bass entry in mm. 29–41 to the soprano entries in m. 40 ff. and m. 102 ff., the latter is distinguished from the former in a couple of significant ways. To begin with, the soprano lines occupy a more exposed register, which makes them comparatively easy to hear against the micropolyphonic background. In addition, the sopranos in m. 40 and m. 102 do not exhibit the same degree of symmetry as do the basses in mm. 29-41. Whereas the basses’ initial I2 row form is paired with its retrograde, RI2, the sopranos’ initial P7 form of the row is paired not with R7 (as one might expect), but with RI6 instead. The most likely explanation for this discrepancy has to do with invariances between P7 and RI6: as Example 13 shows, all six dyads are preserved between the latter two rows, and among all four maintain their internal ordering of pitch classes as well. The upshot of this is that the soprano entry of m. 102 stands in an ambivalent relationship with respect to its predecessor, repeating certain of its elements, while reversing others. The ordering of pitch classes within dyads stays essentially the same (with a couple of exceptions), even as the ordering of the dyads themselves is altered. The question raised by the entry in m. 40 is thus ‘answered,’ on one level, by the entry in m. 102. But the fact that the second climax largely reiterates the constituents of the first means that the question posed in m. 40 ff. is, on another level, left unanswered.

EXAMPLE 12: SOPRANO CLIMAXES, M. 40 AND M. 102


A GLOBAL PICTURE

For the most part, the Kyrie’s texture conforms to standard accounts of micropolyphony, with the quantity of overlapping parts obscuring both the contrapuntal structure and the individual voices that comprise it. Yet there are a number of occasions where this model proves less satisfactory in accounting for the Kyrie movement, occasions where voices appear to break free from the tangle of the contrapuntal texture and assert their independence.47 The most striking instance comes with the climaxes in m. 40 and m. 102, where the soprano bundles separate out from the other parts that compose the micropolyphonic complex. But examples of local moments of emergence may also be identified, such as the bass voice-bundle beginning in m. 29, or the mezzo-soprano voice-bundle from m. 79 on. The same could be said for the correlated surges that occur in all of the Kyrie lines (though these are more or less pronounced depending on the intensity of the various peaks and their position within the overall texture; that is, Kyrie lines that lie at the registral extremes of the sound mass will have a better chance of standing out than those contained within it).48 The continual push and pull between the countervailing impulses of absorption and emergence suggest that the formation of the mass out of the overlapping parts does not occur smoothly, without resistance.

EXAMPLE 13: INVARIANT DYADS BETWEEN SOPRANO ENTRIES, M. 40 FF. AND

M. 102 FF. SOLID LINES INDICATE DYADS WHERE ORDERING OF CONSTITUENT

PCS IS PRESERVED. DASHED LINES INDICATE DYADS WHERE ORDERING

OF CONSTITUENT PCS IS REVERSED


Even if individual voices are occluded for substantial portions of the movement, the fact that they surface intermittently suggests that these voices—to the extent that they are understood as musical agents—appear to struggle against this state of affairs.

Yet the various moments where individual parts and smaller bundles of voices segregate from the mass, moments that give the micropoly-phonic texture its rough and uneven surface, do not constitute a random assortment of unrelated gestures. Rather, these moments possess their own peculiar logic and, as a result of this, are woven back into the evolving mass. Registral connections are key to this process. As Bernard has observed, registral proximity takes on a peculiar “associative power” in Ligeti’s counterpoint, in that it permits linear connections to be forged between non-adjacent members of a canonic strand; and this is what allows a single, seemingly seamless shape to materialize out of vagaries of the underlying canonic parts.49 A similar phenomenon can be witnessed in the Kyrie, albeit with peculiarities that distinguish it from works like Lontano and Lux Aeterna. Whereas the longer durational values of the notes that make up the canons in the latter two works mean that connections between registrally proximate events are usually direct, oftentimes overlapping temporally, in the Kyrie the greater degree of rhythmic activity makes such direct linkages more ephemeral. In this movement, registral connection is a function of perceptual salience: the capacity of the Kyrie and Christe lines to project certain pitches (or more generally, regions of pitch-space) is what allows registrally proximate events to be conjoined. For instance, the opening Kyrie melody in the altos prepares the listener for the entry of the mezzo-sopranos in measure 13 (see Example 14). Virtually coincident with the altos’ surge toward Ab4 on the second beat of the measure is the mezzo-sopranos’ entry on the same pitch. It thus appears as if the mezzo-sopranos’ entry is triggered by the upward push of the altos. The relationship between the two parts is further reinforced by the sense of balance that is established between their respective gestures: the gradual build toward a high-point in terms of pitch, dynamics and rhythm in the altos is answered by the prominent attack of the oboe and bassoon doubling the mezzo-sopranos, which then fade. Similar linkages, conjoining the peaks of the Kyrie lines with entries in other parts, occur throughout the movement. From mm. 84–86, the sopranos climb from E#4 to Db5, alighting briefly on C5 just before the mezzo-sopranos enter on the same pitch in m. 86 (see Example 15). In this way, the sopranos’ ascent serves to activate this region of registral space for the mezzo-sopranos. These two passages, and others like them, knit the voices into the global texture.


EXAMPLE 14: ALTOS LEADING TO MEZZO-SOPRANO ENTRY, MM. 8–13


EXAMPLE 15: SOPRANOS LEADING TO MEZZO-SOPRANO ENTRY, MM. 84–86


As is the case with the surges that are worked into the Kyrie lines themselves, high-points within the Christe lines generally serve to prepare subsequent vocal entries. A case in point comes in m. 18, where mezzo-soprano 1 reaches its registral high-point, B4, imme-diately prior to the entry of the sopranos on the same pitch (see Example 16). Again, a crescendo in one part is complemented by an attack and decrescendo in another part. (In fact, both of these B4s are prepared for beforehand by the climax of the altos on this same pitch during mm. 13 and 14.) More conspicuous is the basses’ Christe line beginning in m. 29. As noted above, the basses are particular salient in this passage since they unfold a retrograde form of the wedge pattern prevalent through the rest of the movement. The basses are further brought out within the texture in m. 33 by the sudden increase in their dynamic level, from pppp to mf. However, this outburst turns out to be more than an arbitrary event, as the dramatic upward leap to C#4 masks the mezzo-sopranos’ entry on this pitch in m. 33 (see Example 17). Here, as elsewhere, the local moment of textural emergence helps mask a subsequent vocal entry and thus makes the latter appear to proceed smoothly from what has gone before. A pattern thus emerges over the course of the Kyrie: by anticipating ensuing entries, moments where distinct voices (or voice-bundles) stand out against the textural ground help advance the growth and development of the overall sound mass. The disruptive force of such moments are thus attenuated, as the cluster expands to fill whatever space a particular voice might open up.

In addition to the registral connections formed between relatively proximate vocal parts are those spanning longer durations. One such connection can be heard between the sopranos’ initial Kyrie statement (mm. 18–39) and subsequent Christe statement (mm. 40–52). Starting in m. 18 the sopranos present a Kyrie line in inversion: beginning from its initial B4, the melody ascends to Eb5 in mm.21–23, creating a subordinate peak, before descending towards its final note, A4. The melodic high point of the Kyrie line, Eb5, thus opens up the register for the subsequent entry of the sopranos’ Christe melody on F5. Similarly, the second climax in the soprano parts, by answering the arc traced by the soprano bundle in m. 40 ff., forms a large-scale linkage spanning much of the movement. This points to another ambiguity inherent the climactic passages of the Kyrie. Earlier I noted the ability of the vocal bundles to emerge out of the texture at these two moments. Yet it is unclear whether they represent points where the sopranos ‘escape’ from the micropolyphonic texture, or are simply the culmination of the sound mass’s process of expansion. The first interpretation, stressing their emergence, is supported by the registral


EXAMPLE 16: MEZZO-SOPRANOS LEADING TO SOPRANO ENTRY, MM. 13–18


EXAMPLE 17: BASSES LEADING TO MEZZO-SOPRANO ENTRY, MM. 29–33


position of the voices, their doubling by the brass, and the disjunct nature of the Christe lines that comprise the vocal bundles. The second is supported by the way the first climax flows out of the preceding soprano ascent, and the way the second climax collapses the uppermost register back into the overall texture (see Example 18).50 The point, however, is not to arrive at a single, conclusive interpretation of these two passages. Indeed, part of what makes these moments so suggestive is that they afford both hearings equally well. Or perhaps one might say they allow both interpretations to coexist, with the climaxes condensing the dialectical interplay between emergence and subsumption into a pair of highly charged moments. Heard in this way, the climaxes embody the dramatic tension that underlies the movement as a whole. And they embody this tension not just figuratively, but literally: not just in the sense of rendering this dialectical relationship concrete, but in transforming it into something that can be physically—that is, corporeally—apprehended. It is this corporeal aspect of listening to the Kyrie that I would like to explore in the following, concluding section of the article.

* * *

At one point in his essay on the “crisis of the figure” Metzger para-phrases Christian Wolff’s dictum that even the most disparate succession of sound events will ultimately come to be perceived as melodic.51 Metzger sees this as resulting from a steady process of relativization: where once the wide-ranging leaps of Webern’s instrumental music seemed to represent the ne plus ultra of disconti-nuity, the chance works of Cage have made them seem lyrical by comparison. To a certain extent, the observation holds true for Ligeti’s micropolyphonic works, including the Kyrie movement of the Requiem. While the masking of the individual parts limits their capacity to serve as the primary focus of the listener’s attention, the growth, evolution, and changing shape of the overall texture provide an alternative focus for listeners to latch onto. And as the discussion above suggests, the tendency for emergent lines to be woven back into the unfolding textural mass means that the listener’s attention is continuously being channeled back towards the composite texture. From this point of view, the gestural or figurative dimension of the movement does not disappear, but is displaced from the immediate, note-to-note level to that of the mass as a whole. The shape unfolded by the composite texture becomes a ‘figure’ (à la Metzger), albeit one


EX

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whose dimensions have been distended. This way of conceiving the movement is supported by the origins of the micropolyphonic technique in electronic music, specifically in Ligeti’s unfinished Pièce électronique no. 3, which was to have explored gradual transitions between sound and noise through steady transformations of their constituent partials. In his sketches for Pièce électronique, Ligeti treats the partials of a complex sound as one might treat the parts of a contrapuntal texture.52 Once transposed into the domain of conven-tional, acoustic instruments, however, the relation between electronic music and part-writing is inverted: now the individual parts of the orchestral texture are conceived as if they were “. . . the harmonic partials of an imaginary fundamental.”53 And just as the spectral components of a sound fuse into a single, seemingly undifferentiated entity, so too are the individual voices supposed to fuse into a single sonic image in micropolyphony.

But as appealing as this metaphoric displacement of the figure may be on a conceptual level, it is unclear whether the large-scale gesture created by the sound mass is able to assume the perceptual functions traditionally served by melodic figures. As research into musical gesture in the past few decades has indicated, a significant part of listening to and understanding music is grounded in the sense of bodily involve-ment it induces. Andrew Mead puts it succinctly when he says that “music’s path to the brain is through the body.”54 A couple of aspects of this corporeal engagement are crucial for the present discussion. First and foremost is the role played by listeners in imagining the effort that musical performance entails. Heard patterns of musical sound do not convey information solely about the organization or structure of a piece, but also tell the listener something of the actions that went into their production. The awareness of bodily effort that is thereby gained is not passively cognized, but is actively felt (what Mead terms “kinesthetic empathy,” or what David Lidov dubs “psychosomatic isomorphism”).55 This pre-reflective, empathetic experience is enabled at least in part by another process, namely the mimetic impulses that music arouses in listeners. One of the principal vehicles by means of which listeners can sense the strain involved in a particularly difficult passage of music—even among those lacking a background or training in musical performance—comes out of a tendency to mimic the production of the sounds heard. Mimetic participation of this sort can take a number of different forms, including tapping one’s foot, humming or singing along with the music, moderating breathing, swaying, dancing, or tensing one’s muscles in sympathy with certain gestures, and so forth. One particularly important site for imaginative participation is subvocalization. Arnie Cox, for one, has pointed out


the significance that this kind of ‘covert’ co-performance holds for our capacity to apprehend music: “Since subvocalization is grounded in the physical experience of overt vocalization, comprehension of heard song thus appears to involve comparison with our own experience of singing or otherwise vocalizing. This subvocal empathy is part of what we feel when listening to singing. . . .”56 This provides a concrete basis for the commonsense notion that the voice is a privileged conduit for the corporeal experience of music—be it the real voice of everyday speech and song production, or the “inner voice” that Edward Cone famously evoked when he said that “To listen to music is to yield our inner voice to the composer’s domination. Or better: it is to make the composer’s voice our own.”57

This brief detour into gesture and vocality sheds light on what the interplay between emergence and subsumption in the Kyrie affords listeners at an experiential level. Moments when individual voices manage to separate themselves from the texture offer listeners a fleeting opportunity to enter into this sort of mimetic engagement with the music. Conversely, the retreat of the individual voice back into the global texture withdraws this site of corporeal identification from the listener’s grasp and may assume an unsettling quality as a result. At the same time, the large-scale shape traced by the micropolyphonic texture presents a sonic image whose production exceeds the mimetic resources of the individual. If one agrees with Lidov that gesture “encompasses all brief, expressive molar units of motor activity,”58 then it is hard to see how the shape unfolded by the texture as a whole, in spite of its simplicity and intelligibility, can be gestural in anything other than a metaphoric sense. All of this helps explain the rather drastic imagery one encounters in the literature surrounding the Kyrie, with its allusions to mobs and mass society. As I noted in the introduction, the correlations underpinning such interpretations are fairly straightforward: the individual voice serves as a token of the individual subject, from which it logically follows that the voice’s absorption into the texture offers a concrete image of some kind of social dystopia. Yet a representational account such as this fails to capture the vividness of the language critics have employed to describe the movement, or the immediacy of its experience for that matter. For the subsumption of the individual voice is not just represented in quasi-visual or discursive terms, but is felt viscerally, as if one were swallowed up by the music. The result is an experience that is at one and the same time endosomatic and exosomatic, in and outside the body.

The same line of argument applies to Metzger’s “crisis of the figure.” In a sense, his use of the term Figur as a stand-in for melodic


and gestural elements in general is particularly apt as the word (like its English cognate) is multivalent, capable of designating both a brief musical unit and the human form. And while this latter signification of Figur remains latent within his essay, an unarticulated subtext, there is little doubt that it animates his discourse. The “crisis of the figure” thus appears to entail a broader crisis of the musical subject, one that is located both within the work, among the virtual agents heard to inhabit the music, and in the listener’s ability to imaginatively participate in the music’s unfolding and thus identify with its virtual agents. But far from portending a loss of expressive force, the tenuous status of these ‘figures’—at least in this and other micropolyphonic works by Ligeti—is precisely what makes the music so compelling in the first place. It is the blocking of “kinesthetic empathy” throughout much of the work that makes those rare occasions where the phenomenon can take place without impediment (most notably in the sopranos’ two climactic passages) all the more enthralling. But even where the individual voices do not quite manage to escape the confines of the musical texture, their continuing presence just below the threshold of our awareness gives the music a palpable charge, a sense of expectation. It is this sense—the sense that at any moment the figure might resurface, that the individual line might make its lingering presence felt—that is key to understanding not only the Kyrie’s peculiar fascination, but the substantial allegorical demands that listeners, scholars, and critics have placed upon the movement over the years.


NOT ES

1. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, “Zur Krise der Figur,” in Musik wozu: Liter-atur zu Noten, ed. Rainer Riehn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 135.

2. Anthony Milner, “The Vocal Element in Melody,” The Musical Times, vol. 97, no. 1357 (March, 1956), 129.

3. The full passage reads: “Es handelt sich bei dieser komposi-torischen Barbarei nicht um eine Ungeschicklichkeit oder einen Irrtum Schönbergs, sondern um einen objektiven, historisch erre-ichten Zustand einer Materialdimension. . . .” Metzger, 134.

4. “. . . so ward mit Schönberg, und zwar mit der sogenannten freien Atonalität, die Figur autonom: in melodisch sowohl als in har-monischer Hinsicht.” Metzger, 133.

5. “Es ist, als wäre die emanzipierte, von keinem präkonzipierten Sys-tem mehr getragene musikaliche Figur nicht mehr—im Hegelschen Sinn—‘substantiell’: die von jeder Heteronomie befreiten, rein in sich selbst durchgebildeten Einzelfiguren überschlagen sich, wirken tendenziell ornamental, und nicht stets ist zu spüren, daß sie noch wesentlich mehr als einmal Triller, Mordente, Praller und Dop-pelschläge wert sein sollen.” Metzger, 133.

6. Metzger, 130–1.

7. “In der heutigen Musik verschiedenster Orientierungen viel weiter verbreitet sind Versuche, die Figuren zu verstecken, aus denen die musikalische Faktur sich konstituiert. Als schämten die Komponis-ten sich ihrer Melodien, überlagern sie ihrer so viele in so vielen Zeitmaßen, daß keine mehr gut und plastisch zu hören ist.”Metzger, 131.

8. The two other composers that Metzger evokes in this connection are Iannis Xenakis and Jan Morthensen (for whose book Nonfigu-rative Musik Metzger’s essay originally served as the introduction).

9. Ligeti, György Ligeti in Conversation with Péter Várnai,Josef Häusler, Claude Samuel and Himself, trans. Gabor J. Sch-abert, Sarah E. Soulsby, Terence Kilmartin and Geoffrey Skelton (London: Eulenberg Books, 1983), 14. The most thorough explo-ration of micropolyphony is to be found in Jane Clendinning’s


“Contrapuntal Techniques in the Music of György Ligeti,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1989).

10. Ligeti’s continuing reliance on the line as a constitutive category of musical composition (and perception) can be gleaned from his writings of the late 1950s and 1960s. His discussion in “Metamor-phoses of Musical Form” of serialism’s tendency to obscure its constituent ‘threads’ is typical. As Robert Piencikowski has pointed out, such thinking (evident also in Ligeti’s analysis of Boulez’s Structures 1a) applies a melodic framework to evaluate music that strives to dissolve this very framework. For this reason, Pien-cikowski believes that Ligeti’s ‘misreading’ of Boulez’s intentions, his focus on ‘threads’ rather than on ‘densities,’ ‘groups,’ and ‘planes,’ reveals more about Ligeti’s own compositional predilec-tions than it does about Boulez’s work; see Robert Piencikowki, “Inschriften,” Musiktheorie, vol. 12, no. 1 (1997), 11. Christoph von Blumröder makes a similar observation, noting that Ligeti, unlike his colleagues at Darmstadt during the late fifties and early sixties, tended to analyze Webern’s music according to traditional musical categories, such as harmony and melody. Blumröder, “‘Ein weitverzweigtes Spinnennetz’—Ligeti über Webern,” in György Ligeti: Personalstil—Avantgardismus—Popularität, (Wien: Universal Edition, 1987), 29–30.

11. Clendinning, “Contrapuntal Techniques” 34.

12. Bernard, “Voice Leading as a Spatial Function in the Music of Ligeti.” Music Analysis, 13:2/3 (Oct. 1994): 227–53.

13. Alastair Williams, “Music as Immanent Critique: Stasis and Devel-opment in the Music of Ligeti.” Music and the Politics of Culture ed. Christopher Norris (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 205.

14. Amy Bauer, “Compositional Process and Parody in the Music of György Ligeti,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University 1997), 98–99.

15. Metzger, 131.

16. Ibid.

17. “Instead of an ordered community moving with mutual respect along the lines of a canon, we are presented with a mob.” Paul Griffiths, György Ligeti (New York: Robson Books, 1997), 50. Ist-van Anhalt likewise invokes imagery of social disorder: “The canonic structures here have a ‘blind leading the blind’ character,


conveying the cumulative affect of a hopeless predicament for the whole mass; there is no appeal, perhaps because there is no being to whom one may appeal, and for the individual molecules there is nowhere else to go to.” Istvan Anhalt, Alternative Voices: Essays on Contemporary Vocal and Choral Composition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 200.

18. “. . . this kind of musical life is very much a metaphor of certain aspects of urban society. The person-as-atom can enter the urban society anonymously and therefore easily, but can just as easily be replaced. This knowledge tends to generate an atmosphere of mutual indifference, accompanied by a certain amount of tension.” Thomas Clifton, Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenol-ogy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 169–71.

19. “. . . by refusing to celebrate the independent quality of inner and outer voices, Mr. Ligeti’s polyphony acts like a socialist state in which the individual effort anonymously serves the whole.” Bernard Holland, “Unnerving Master of Terror and the Absurd,” New York Times (April 21, 1998), E7.

20. Richard Steinitz, György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), 146.

21. Indeed, it is this symbolic charge that is simultaneously exploited and reinforced in the best-known interpretation of the movement, the one enacted by Stanley Kubrick in using the music for the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey. For two treatments of the movement’s role in 2001, see Arved Ashby, “Modernism Goes to the Movies,” in The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Mean-ing, Intention, Ideology, ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester NY: Rochester University Press, 2004); and David Patterson, “Music, Structure and Metaphor in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’” American Music, Vol. 22, No. 3. (Autumn, 2004), pp. 444–474.

22. See Allan Moore, Rock: The Primary Text (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1993), 24 and 167; Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 38–41; and Nicholas Cook, “Theorizing Musical Meaning,” Music Theory Spectrum vol. 23, no. 2 (2001), 180–181.

23. Monica Lichtenfeld, “Requiem von György Ligeti: Einleitung und Kommentar,” Wort und Wahrheit vol. 23, no. 4 (1968), 312.


24. Jonathan Bernard, “A Key to Structure in the Kyrie of György Ligeti’s Requiem,” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung no. 16 (2003), 45.

25. Amy Bauer has argued for this reading of the work’s form; see Bauer, “Compositional Process and Parody,” 102–103.

26. This interpretation is favored by Pietro Cavallotti. See Cavallotti, “Sul rapporto tra ‘Formvorstellung’ e ‘Satztechnik’ nel ‘Requiem’ di György Ligeti,” Rivista internazionale di musica sacra 20, no. 1 (1999), 313.

27. Ulrich Dibelius, György Ligeti: eine Monographie in Essays (Mainz: Schott, 1994), 94.

28. Clendinning reads the movement’s form in this way; see “Contra-puntal Techniques,” 126.

29. The fact that the various movements of the Requiem draw on dichotomous stylistic strands in Ligeti’s output led many early commentators on the work to identify it as a ‘synthesis’ or ‘culmi-nation’ of his musical output. See for example Ove Nordwall, “Current Chronicle: Sweden,” Musical Quarterly vol. 52, no. 1 (January 1966), 112; and Erkki Salmenhaara, Das musikalische Material und seine Behandlung in den Werken Apparitions, Atmo-sphères, Avnetures, und Requiem von György Ligeti (Helsinki: Suomen Musiikkitie-teellinen Seura, 1969), 165. The source of this idea was no doubt Ligeti himself, who described the work as “a kind of summary of my previous compositional methods. . . .” Ligeti, “Viele Pläne, aber wenig Zeit,” Melos vol. 32, no. 7–8 (July/August 1965), 251.

30. This trait is more pronounced in the soprano’s line than the mezzo-soprano’s; whereas the former will proceed in a single direction for only two steps before reversing direction, the latter manages to string together three consecutive stepwise moves in the same direction on two occasions—once in mm. 58–61, and again in mm. 62–65.

31. See David Huron, “Voice Denumerability in Polyphonic Music of Homogeneous Timbres,” Music Perception 6 no. 4 (Summer 1989), 361–382; and Huron, “Tone and Voice: A Derivation of the Rules of Voice-Leading from Perceptual Principles,” Music Perception 19 no. 1 (Fall 2001), 45–48.

32. Huron, “Tone and Voice,” 49.


33. W. J. Dowling, “The Perception of Interleaved Melodies,” Cogni-tive Psychology 5, no. 3 (1973), 322–327; Yves Tougas and Albert Bregman, “Crossing of Auditory Streams,” Journal of Experimen-tal Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 11, no. 6 (1985), 788–798; and Huron, “The Avoidance of Part-Crossing in Polyphonic Music: Perceptual Evidence and Musical Practice,” Music Perception 9, no. 1 (Fall 1991), 93–103.

34. Albert Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organi-zation of Sound (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 491–92.

35. Stephen McAdams and Albert Bregman, “Hearing Musical Streams,” Computer Music Journal 3, no. 4 (December 1979), 31–34; Diana Deutsch, “Grouping Mechanisms in Music,” in The Psy-chology of Music, 2nd edition, ed. Diana Deutsch (London: Academic Press, 1999), 320–321.

36. Deutsch, 313; Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis, 462 ff.; Huron, “Tone and Voice,” 22–24.

37. McAdams and Bregman, 30–31; James K. Wright and Albert Breg-man, “Auditory Stream Segregation and the Control of Disso-nance in Polyphonic Music,” Contemporary Music Review 2, no. 1 (1987), 77–79.

38. McAdams and Bregman, 28–29; Deutsch, 313.

39. Jennifer Iverson has made a persuasive case that the Kyrie subject, like the Christe subject, derives from what is identified in the sketches as the Grundtypus row (see below), as each new pitch that is introduced in the Kyrie line corresponds to a member of a slightly altered form of the Grundtypus. See Jennifer Iverson, “Historical Memory and György Ligeti’s Sound-Mass Music, 1958–1968,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2009), 233.

40. In the Alto 1 part, for instance, there are only thirteen occasions (out of the 111 possible) where the duration of adjacent notes stand in a ratio greater than 2:1.

41. On the role of discontinuity in grouping processes, see Fred Ler-dahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983), 44–49. See also Christo-pher Hasty, “Segmentation and Process in Post-Tonal Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 3 (Spring 1981), 58; and Dora Hanninen, “Orientations, Criteria, Segments: A General Theory of Segmenta-


tion for Music Analysis,” Journal of Music Theory 45, no. 2 (Autumn 2001), 360–363. Of particular note is Lerdahl’s essay “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” in which he discusses the problems that the absence of “distinctive transitions” in post-1945 music presents for segmentation. He notes that “Certain recent musical developments (pioneered for instance by Ligeti) have tended to blur distinctions between events,” thereby inhibiting “the inference of structure.” Lerdahl, “Cognitive Con-straints on Compositional Systems,” Contemporary Music Review 6, no. 2 (1992), 104. (My thanks to Cliff Callender for reminding me of this passage.)

42. A similar point is made in Marina Lobanova, György Ligeti: Style, Ideas, Poetics (Berlin: Ernst Kuhn Verlag, 2002), 124.

43. Dibelius, 94.

44. Bernard, “A Key to Structure,” 45.

45. The symmetrical structure of the Christe lines has been discussed by a number of other authors. See Pierre Michel, György Ligeti, compositeur d’aujourd’hui ([Paris]: Minerve: Alternative Diffusion, 1985), 69–70; Cavallotti, 308–310; and Lobanova, 121–122.

46. On timbre’s tendency to override pitch proximity in streaming, see Huron, “Tone and Voice,” 48.

47. It should be noted that the voices the listener hears as emerging from the texture at any given moment may either be real (i.e., individual parts as notated in the score) or virtual (i.e., produced by allocating notes drawn from different voices within a bundle to a single, virtual stream).

48. Bernard has noted in this connection that the perception of voices in micropolyphony “depends for all practical purposes entirely on their spatial positions—that is, on their literal functions as upper and lower boundaries of occupied pitch space.” Bernard, “Voice Leading,” 231. Inner voices, on the contrary, are not heard as lin-ear events, but as harmonic ‘filler’: “in a Ligeti texture such a voice, overtaken [by an outer voice] would instantly vanish.” Bernard, “Voice Leading,” 232.

49. Bernard, “Voice Leading,” 231.

50. Also important here is the fact that the wedge contours in both entries are themselves likely to undergo melodic fission (i.e., the segregation into distinct streams): the lower edge of their respec-


tive contours is liable to be absorbed into the sound mass, while the upper edge remains discernible.

51. Metzger, 130.

52. Ligeti discusses the principles guiding the composition of Pièce électronique no. 3 in two essays: “Auswirkungen der Elektronis-chen Musik auf mein Kompositorisches Schaffen,” Experimentelle Musik, Raum Musik, Visuelle Musik, Medien Musik, Wort Musik, Elektronik Musik, Computer Musik. Internationale Woche für Experimentelle Musik 1968. Ausgew. Vortr. Aus d. Gemeinsamen Veranst. d. Akad. d. Künst u. d. Techn. Univ. Berlin unter Mitw. d. Internat. Ges. f. Musikwiss. Ed. Frits Winckel (Berlin: Mann, 1970); and “Musik und Technik.” Computermusik: Theoretische Grundlagen, Kompositionsgeschichtliche Zusammenhänge, Musik-lernprogramme. Ed. Günther Batel, Günter Kleinen and Dieter Salbert (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1987), 9–35.

53. Ligeti, “Auswirkungen,” 79.

54. Andrew Mead, “Bodily Hearing: Physiological Metaphors and Musical Understanding,” Journal of Music Theory vol. 43, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 15.

55. Mead, “Bodily Hearing,” 3; and David Lidov, “Mind and Body in Music,” Semiotica vol. 66 no. 1 (1987), 75.

56. Arnie Cox, “Hearing, Feeling, Grasping Gestures,” in Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 48.

57. Edward Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1974), 157.

58. Lidov, “Mind and Body,” 77.

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