Volumes for organ

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Volumina for Organ is a composition by György Ligeti that premiered in 1962 . With the later etudes Harmonies and Coulée , it is one of the only works by this composer intended for the organ and is his most famous organ piece. Volumina is an important milestone in Ligeti's compositional oeuvre and initiated a "revolution" in organ music. It is now one of the classics of new music .

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Composition structure

Volumina manages without time-structuring forms such as melody and rhythm . The composition is mainly of variations of timbre and -fülle and emergent beats marked. Volumina largely dispenses with caesuras, but works with the spatial effect of “stationary sound spaces”. Gerd Zacher writes that there is a “rhythm” in the piece only as a flow in time, not as a jerky movement of time. The pitches occur “in such quantities” that melody or harmony is out of the question. Without the usual orientations, attention would be free to new things, which Zacher calls fullness of sound or, with reference to the title of the piece, “volumes”. Different volumes would result from different numbers of keys and registers, different volume levels, altitudes and playing speeds.

Because of this renunciation of time-structuring elements and the concentration on sonority, it is often said that Ligeti created a work with volumes in which the music is taken from time and placed in space, which Adorno's “pseudomorphism of painting in music “Come close. Ligeti thus tied in with his orchestral works Apparitions (1958/1959) and Atmosphères (1961), which were also conceived as sound space compositions . However, for technical reasons, the organ made it necessary to make the clusters even more static and dense, so that movement is not so much the result of interwoven individual voices , but primarily of instrument-typical interferences that create a “shimmering effect”.

At the beginning of the piece, all the stops for a “total cluster” are pulled and the organist is instructed to hold down the entire keyboard of a manual linked to them . Only then should the motor of the organ be switched on so that the music emerges from nowhere, so to speak, until the motor has built up sufficient air pressure. As a result, lower registers are gradually closed so that the initially powerful impulse finally gives way to more delicate structures. At the end of the piece, too, the organ is pushed to its limits again when the wind supply to the pipes gradually breaks down when the motor is switched off.

notation

In order to reproduce the large, dense clusters in which entire parts of the keyboard are usually blocked, Ligeti used graphic notation in the performance score of 1966, supplemented by handwritten instructions. He has completely dispensed with staves and bar lines , with one page of the score corresponding to around 45 seconds - with a total length of around 15 minutes. Ligeti has specially created a legend to explain the symbols used to denote chromatic , diatonic and pentatonic clusters as well as clusters with moving contours or internal chromatic movements. Regarding the piece as a whole, the instructions say:

“The large shape of the piece is to be designed like a single large arch: there are no pauses in the piece, and indeed no actual turning points; […] The stationary sound spaces and their gradual, continuous change should be realized by the interpreter in such a way that the sound states and processes arouse the feeling of great calm. "

- György Ligeti

Franz Danksagmüller made the notation the subject of the 2013 St. Jakobikirche in Lübeck by projecting the edited score onto the church ceiling during the performance.

Playing technique

A special cluster technique is required to play the piece, using forearms, fists and flat hands. In addition to switching the motor on and off with sustained sounds, as already mentioned, other techniques for manipulating the wind pressure, half-pulled register loops and balanced keystrokes were tested in the piece. An Arte documentation about a performance on the organ of Engelberg Abbey gave an impression of what was happening at the console, which is usually hidden from the live listener . The use of the registers is as important as playing on the manuals, so that there was talk of an "emancipation of the registrants".

Origin and premiere

Volumes was Ligeti's first commissioned work since his escape from Hungary to which he and other composers Hans Otte for a performance at the Sauer Organ of Bremen Cathedral were asked. Otte, who three years earlier had been employed as the youngest head of music at ARD at Radio Bremen, had asked the composer the following question as part of the “ pro musica nova ” concert series he had initiated : “How can you use the organ in contemporary music?” That The work was to be premiered on May 4, 1962 by Karl-Erik Welin , after Ligeti had composed it in 1961/1962. The then president of the Bremen cathedral builders forbade the concert in the cathedral after the organizers had previously received a confirmation.

Various contemporary witnesses give various reasons for this decision. Ligeti himself reports that the world premiere was canceled due to concern for the Sauer organ after a smoldering fire that the piece triggered during a rehearsal on an organ in Gothenburg. The composer Bengt Hambraeus , who was also involved in the world premiere, wants to remember that the decision was an expression of the disapproval that Hans Otte wanted to perform a sacred dance as part of his own composition Alpha-Omega . The fire, apparently triggered by a darning needle that was supposed to replace a missing fuse, only occurred as a result of the ban on the search for an alternative organ for the recording. Finally, the piece was recorded for the world premiere on two Stockholm organs, which, taken together, had a sound comparable to the Bremen organ, and a recording was made from it, which was then played from the tape in the Radio Bremen concert hall . In the hurry, however, it was overlooked that the tape was too short, so that the end of the piece was not recorded during the recording.

Even if the numerous mishaps and legends surrounding the premiere can no longer be exactly reconstructed today, they still fit the anarchic gesture of the modern music scene of the time. The concert in the Bremer Rundfunkhaus, at which works by Mauricio Kagel and Bengt Hambraeus were also on the program, has a musical historical significance that goes beyond these rather short-term provocations. So it was later described by church musician Martin Lutschewitz as a turning point in organ music. A live world premiere of the entire piece, also by Karl-Erik Welin, took place a few days later in Amsterdam.

Performance practice and reception

The fact that the piece is a technical challenge for modern organs was once again shown at a performance by Guy Bovet in Bern, where all the organ's fuses in the French Church blown. The organist from Bern, Hans Eugen Frischknecht , switched to using only the registers of the main work. In other churches, for example in Hamburg or Basel, the performance of the piece - as before in Bremen - was prevented in certain cases. In Hamburg, the piece was performed by Gerd Zacher in the Luther Church in 1965 and broadcast on the radio, which was commented on in the magazine Musik und Kirche as follows: "According to our musical perception today, this work is not music, let alone organ music [...]" At the end of the piece, the organ blows the wind out, was, according to Zacher, interpreted by many listeners as the end of a symbol of faith. Other listeners compared the piece to the organist Zacher in view of the loss of old orientations with the collapse after the war - and at the same time the cause to open up to the new.

In 1966 the piece was revised by Ligeti again. In the meantime it has become a modern classic that is performed accordingly often. Volumina is also firmly anchored in church music - although it comes from a composer without religious ties. Daniel Glaus said on the occasion of a performance in a Pentecost service that the audience "the Holy Spirit roared around the ears". In the meantime it has also been performed in Bremen Cathedral without any technical complications, for example on March 19, 2009 in the inaugural concert of the organist and Bremen music professor Hans Davidsson , who studied organ in Gothenburg.

Recordings by Karl-Erik Welin (organ of the Petrikirche zu Mülheim / Ruhr), Gerd Zacher, Zsigmond Szathmáry (with registrant Ai Szathmáry at St. Martins Church in Olten), Hans-Ola Ericsson and Dominik Susteck are available on CD .

Recordings

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Gerd Zacher: The experience of the absence of God in the music of the 20th century. In: Wolfhart Pannenberg (ed.): The experience of the absence of God in modern culture. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, ISBN 3-525-56168-7 , pp. 137-158; P. 139, p. 152 and p. 155.
  2. ↑ a b Kimberly Marshall: György Ligeti (1923-2006) . In: Christopher S. Anderson (Ed.): Twentieth-Century Organ Music. Routledge, 2013, ISBN 1136497897 , pp. 262-285; P. 274 f.
  3. ↑ See Theodor Adorno: Philosophy of Modern Music. Translated by Anne G. Mitchell, Wesley V. Blomster, A&C Black, 2003, ISBN 0826414907 , p. 194.
  4. ↑ Manuel Schwiertz: It rattles in the box. In: ON - Neue Musik Köln , edition 01/2009, p. 14 f.
  5. ↑ Walther Lidtke: Program Organ Recital László Fassang , Konzerthaus Dortmund (ed.), 2012.
  6. ↑ a b c Hannes Liechti: Bizarre, impressive, shocking and amusing. ( Memento of the original from December 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The Fretless Blog ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , August 27, 2012. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fretlessblog.ch @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fretlessblog.ch
  7. ↑ See Franz Danksagmüller: Graphic Scores. , danksagmueller.com , accessed December 4, 2014.
  8. ↑ a b Martin Lutschewitz: New Organ Music. 1978, p. 29, quoted by Constantin Gröhn: Dieter Schnebel and Arvo Pärt: Composers as "Theologians" . Lit-Verlag, Münster 2006, ISBN 3825895998 , p. 75.
  9. ↑ György Ligeti (1923-2006): Volumina , 4 minutes, on the organ of Engelberg Monastery, youtube.com .
  10. ↑ See the video instructive on the registrants' contribution, György Ligeti: Volumina (Lars Gjerde, organist; Scott Perkins and Aaron James, registrants) , 15:09 minutes, recording from 2012, youtube.com
  11. ↑ This is embellished to the effect that the organ in Gothenburg Cathedral was burned out, cf. Manuel Schwiertz: It rattles in the box. ON - New Music Cologne, issue 01/2009.
  12. ↑ Other prominent events in this direction, which is closely related to Fluxus , were z. B. a year later the world premiere of Ligeti's Poème symphonique for a hundred metronomes in front of dignitaries in the town hall of the Dutch municipality of Hilversum and a happening in the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art in 1964, in which Karl-Erik Welin hit a grand piano so hard with a chainsaw, that he seriously injured himself in the leg.
  13. ↑ Walter Kwasnik: Thoughts on avant-garde organ music. In: Musik und Kirche , 36 (1965), pp. 196–198.
  14. ↑ Weser-Kurier of March 18, 2009.