MUSIC / BENJAMIN EPSTEIN : Tooting His Horn for Brahms : Ligeti’s Chamber Work to Be Played at Chapman University Is Homage to Composer

Very, very few chamber works go directly from first performance into the standard repertory. Gyorgy Ligeti’s Trio for violin, horn and piano, published in 1982 and with several recordings currently available, can count itself among that elite group.

Ligeti’s Trio is an homage to Johannes Brahms, and during a brief phone interview recently, the composer said it bears the dedication because his predecessor’s Horn Trio “is the only other good piece besides mine in the genre.”

Even bearing in mind Ligeti’s assessment of the Brahms work--that it “hovers in the musical heavens”--he may be right.

The piece will be played Thursday at Chapman University in Orange (and Friday at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church) by the Southwest Chamber Society. The program also includes “Trois Gymnopedies” by Erik Satie, and Schubert’s Trio in E-flat for violin, cello and piano. The musicians include Society Artistic Director Jeff von der Schmidt on horn, violinist Peter Marsh, cellist Roger Lebow and pianist Gloria Cheng.

Ligeti, who is Visiting Scholar in Residence this month at the Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities in Santa Monica, was reached last week between a dress rehearsal of two of his works with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and other presumably pressing engagements.

He kept a photographer patiently waiting for more than an hour during a chamber rehearsal Sunday night, then refused to have his picture taken.

With interview time also apparently in short supply--he cut the talk off after about 15 minutes, roughly the same length as his Trio--Ligeti (pronounced LIG-eh-tee)--he kept the discussion to music and music only.

An Oxford Dictionary of Music description of his scores as “dense but not thick”--a characterization he had not heard--provided an easy ice breaker.

“Beautiful!” he said. With a laugh, he added, “Not that I understand it. Perhaps dense because it’s very complex, while if it were thick you could not swallow it. Steve Reich and Terry Riley write minimal music. Mine is maximal music. But it’s also very transparent.”

The local performances mark several anniversaries. Ligeti last visited the United States 20 years ago. Born in the central European region then known as Transylvania, he turns 70 this year. The Southwest Chamber season also celebrates what would have been the 100th birthday of French composer Darius Milhaud, a longtime San Francisco Bay Area resident.

Ligeti calls the compositional technique he used in his electronic music of the late ‘50s “micropolyphony”; when translated to subsequent works for live performers, the technique meant that every string player in an orchestra might have a different musical line--”so many layers, so many individual voices, that you cannot hear the separate voices, that they melt together,” he explained.

His Requiem and “Lux aeterna” (both used in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”) are two of the most beautiful compositions to come out of the ‘60s.

He found himself using hybrid tuning systems, “changing those systems like a chameleon, varying from piece to piece, experimenting with something between harmony and sound color or timber.”

Those experiments also led to complicated rhythmic patterns, as evidenced by his “Poeme symphonique” for 100 metronomes, which he described as “pure rhythmic minimalist.”

“I had no knowledge of Terry Riley and Steve Reich,” Ligeti commented. “We had no contact, and minimalist music was totally different. Yet we did something quite similar--thinking in grid systems, shifting phases, having (notes of) asymmetrical duration. . . . (Riley) was doing it tonally; I was doing it non-tonally. But it was parallel thinking.”

Ligeti had no easy description for music he has written recently.

“Writing music for me now is similar to science,” Ligeti said. “If you solve the problem, you have 100 new problems. I have no general dogma, there is not an established style. I go step by step, and I never know what will come next.”

Brahmsian influences (save instrumentation) are conspicuously absent in Ligeti’s Horn Trio; one finds instead Latin American “commercial” folk influences such as salsa and rumba. The more-than-slightly askew horn-fifths motive that dominates the work--introduced by the violin as if through an aural fun-house mirror--quotes not Brahms, but Beethoven, in his sonata for piano, “Les Adieux.”

According to Jeff von der Schmidt, the piece, which the Chamber Society also played last season, makes phenomenal demands on the horn player.

“Ligeti treats the modern double horn as if it were an old-fashioned valve-less horn,” Von der Schmidt said. “Most of the work is played using natural overtones, with the pitch uncorrected by modern valves.” He also pointed out, interestingly enough, that “the horn call is never in the horn (part).”

According to Ligeti, the piece incorporates a natural clash of tuning systems.

“The violin tunes with perfect fifths,” Ligeti explained.” The piano has tempered tuning. The horn part is written so that only the natural harmonics or overtones come through. You have in fact three harmonic worlds fighting one against the other.”

The melancholic opening movement leads to what Ligeti’s own notes describe as a “polymetric dance inspired by the various folk musics of nonexisting peoples . . . as if Hungary, Rumania and the entire Balkan region were situated somewhere between Africa and the Caribbean.”

The third movement is a metrically shifted march and homophonic trio, while the intensely moving final passacaglia is “like the photograph of a landscape which . . . has dissipated into nothingness.”

The last movement is so emotionally charged that one can’t help but as whether a particular event in his life inspired it.

“I had a very terrible life. I was persecuted both by Nazis and Communists. Not an easy life. But it is vulgar to think music expresses things you had in . . . “ he said, faltering, “ . . . that happen.

“And now,” he said, “you have enough information.”

Click. * The Southwest Chamber Music Society will play music by Ligeti, Satie, Milhaud and Schubert on Thursday at 8 p.m. in the Salmon Recital Hall at Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. $7 to $14. (800) 726-7147.