Description
- Composer: György Ligeti (1923-2006)
- Format: Full Score
- Instrumentation: Orchestra
- Work: Atmosphères (1961)
- Binding:
- ISMN: 9790008023804
- Size: 11.7 x 16.5 inches
- Pages: None
Description
“Atmosphères” famously overturns all traditional categories of Western classical music. There is absolutely no discernible melody, harmony is reduced to the drifting of saturated chromatic clusters, and pulse – or any sense of normal rhythmical articulation – is entirely absent. All habitual structural sign-posts are also missing as is any relationship to standard forms, despite the ghost of a recapitulation towards the work’s end. Instead the listener is confronted with a slow-motion succession of textures, one oozing into the other, where the instrumental sonority seems to have more in common with the dissolves and hums of electronic music than that of a normal symphony orchestra. Tiny traces of influence can just be discerned – perhaps Debussy, a little Richard Strauss, certainly Bartok – though Ligeti’s vision is of startling, indeed radical, originality. (George Benjamin)
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