Master of Discordance

Driving north along the San Diego Freeway, cresting over Mulholland Drive and into the San Fernando Valley on a recent glorious morning--cerulean sky, fluffy clouds, crystal-clear air after a night of rain--I had an out-of-auto experience.

Traffic was light, the windows were closed and a piece of ethereal modern organ music was playing on the car stereo. It was “Harmonies” by Gyorgy Ligeti, the Hungarian composer prominently featured by the Los Angeles Philharmonic this month and next. This is music of sustained chords that change almost subliminally and feel as though they float in space. They took me with them.

I am hardly alone in having chanced upon this sensation with Ligeti’s music. You may have taken a similar trip. If you’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s famous 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” projected on a large screen and heard it through an enveloping sound system, you, too, have drifted through the void on the wings of Ligeti. His is the spacey music.

“2001” gave Ligeti his 15 minutes of fame, especially thanks to his music being included on the popular soundtrack recording, along with Johann Strauss’ “Blue Danube” Waltz and the opening fanfare to Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” The psychedelic generation couldn’t get enough of something like Ligeti’s 1960 orchestra piece, “Atmospheres,” which Kubrick used as an overture to set the tone of “2001.” What hippie, after all, would not succumb to this continuous tapestry of orchestral sonority? On the surface it is a wall of static sound. But listen deep and you notice the flux, a swirling gradual transformation of sound. Here was exquisite music that confirmed a new generational attitude, namely that mysterious wonder lies behind every mundane exterior.

It is not very likely that audiences will have quite the same mind-set when Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts “Atmospheres” on Friday as part of the festival the Philharmonic is calling “Around Ligeti” in celebration of the composer’s 75th birthday on May 28. Times, we all know, have changed. But so, too, has Ligeti and our sense of him. He is now an old master. His works, if not exactly common, are played and recorded more often than the other European avant-gardists of his generation. Salonen has been lately championing Ligeti with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, Paris and Salzburg, and he is one of the main participants in Sony Classics’ indispensable Ligeti Edition (which is up to seven CDs).

With this kind of perspective on the composer, we now see that Ligeti’s music not only covers a wide spectrum of styles, but ultimately all of it is concerned with inner workings, be it of natural phenomenona or machines or the brain, with clocks and clouds and craziness. “Atmospheres” is part of a larger, grander universe.

Twenty years ago Ligeti wrote an absurd, apocalyptic opera, “Le Grand Macabre,” thattakes place in a grotesque never-never land called Breughelland, and it is tempting to think that he had his own roots in mind. He was born in Dracula’s country, Transylvania, in 1928 and endured a horrifying youth as a Jewish teenager in Nazi Hungary. His father and brother perished in a labor camp. He, however, was drafted into a special unit of the Hungarian army for “unreliable” minorities and forced to undertake dangerous missions, such as carrying explosives to the front line. He escaped and hid in Budapest. Even the war’s end brought only temporary relief. Although Ligeti was able to continue his studies and enroll in the Budapest Academy of Music in 1945, the new Soviet rule in Hungary brought more repression.

It is tempting, as well, to interpret all of Ligeti’s music as coming out of a world in which nothing works quite as it should, a world in which the preposterous is the norm and you had better not trust appearances. But first there was Bartok as a key early influence. No great surprise in that; Bartok loomed over Hungarian music and his were the few Modernist scores readily available after the war. Still, Bartok’s modern techniques were not officially approved, and it was his folk music style that initially attracted Ligeti. Following in the footsteps of his father, the young composer was an avid socialist and believed in Social Realism, and he gladly wrote in the approved musical style meant for lifting the workers’ spirits.

That didn’t last long. Once the implications of Stalinist Realism took hold in the early 1950s, namely outright repression, Ligeti rebelled. Although anything faintly resembling modern art was forbidden, radio waves could not be suppressed across borders and Ligeti got wind of a radically new kind of music from Europe. The avant-garde works of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, in particular, rejected all the emotional trends of music before the war, especially the lingering Romanticism from the previous century.

The new generation was disillusioned and wanted Europe to get over its past. The composers demanded that music explore uncharted territory in order to be relevant and even moral. Regular rhythms brought back memories of goose-stepping Nazis. Conventional melodies and harmonies too easily manipulated emotions. These composers needed music that was mathematically rational yet futuristic and unpredictable in its sounds. Electronic music was dawning and engineering seemed a positive model.

This had tremendous appeal to a composer whose own vision was being stifled by a repressive government. In the wake of the brief 1956 revolution, Ligeti and his wife made the harrowing flight from Hungary and settled in Cologne, where he worked with Stockhausen. And soon his head was in the musical clouds.

Ligeti finally could pursue his fascination with paradox and contradiction and cultivate his sense of irony. He discovered a way to compose music that seemed very still but in reality never stopped moving, something that became known as the “Ligeti effect.” “Atmospheres” is a perfect example. However plump and lush its orchestration sounds in performance, the score appears an intricate map of dense polyphony. And even more distinctive is a later piece for harpsichord, “Continuum,” in which fast, nervous nonstop patterns create the effect of stasis.

Ligeti loves machines, and he often represents them in his music as metaphors for the haywire Kafka-esque bureaucracies he grew up with in Hungary. He enjoys, particularly, the imperfections in machines, and the way those imperfections make them interesting, even human. In 1962 in Holland, he premiered an arresting piece, “Poeme Symphonique,” for 100 metronomes. It begins with a crushing wave of sound, 100 clicking clocks, madly out of sync. Each winds down at its own pace, and as the sound diminishes, a fascinating kaleidoscope of patterns emerges. The metronomes stop, one by one, until we are left with one ticking, so regular and so lonely that we tend to focus less on it than on the absence of the other 99. Any rhythm too regular, any machine too well-regulated, is, in Ligeti’s world, a danger and a negative.

“Poeme Symphonique” clearly points out another aspect of Ligeti--his theatricality, especially when it comes to the incongruous. He has a sense of humor; he cultivates the absurd, and he is not beyond self-parody. “Around Ligeti” does not concentrate on this aspect of the composer (it is too bad the Philharmonic didn’t spring, so to speak, for the metronomes), but the buffoonery is inescapable, nonetheless.

An example can be found in “Aventures” and “Nouvelles Aventures” for three singers, which will be on the Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella program. The texts are nonsense syllables, and the music is both rational in its deep structure and loony on its surface. It recalls the Dada syllabic experiments of Kurt Schwitters. But it also conjures up more mechanical imperfections, this time in the circuitry of the brain.

But then Ligeti himself notes that he tends toward the irregular and the freakish. “Music should not be normal, well-bred, with its tie all neat,” he said in an interview in 1979, a year after his monumentally freakish opera, “Le Grand Macabre,” had its premiere in Hamburg. On the stage, that can be a wild cartoon show. It begins in slapstick with a toccata for a dozen car horns; it ends with the world’s end. Kinky sex and surrealism are part of show. But the nuttiness is subterfuge, which is often the way Ligeti expresses horrors too great to be faced head on. The ultimate theme of “Le Grand Macabre” is death, destruction and, as Peter Sellars revealed in his spiritual production at Salzburg last year, redemption.

The music makes this clear. Throughout the late ‘60s and ‘70s, Ligeti began incorporating in his scores all the things that he had taken out of them in the ‘50s--melodies, rhythms, inherited harmonies. He taught at Stanford in the late ‘60s, and the West Coast inspired him. He picked up ideas about phase patterning and repetition from Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Harry Partch, the maverick Californian, gave Ligeti insight into strange ways of tuning.

All this entered Ligeti’s music. It grew in sophistication but it never lost its profound sense of the peculiar, its utter quirkiness. “Le Grand Macabre” is a musical maze of intricate set pieces and wild effects, of violent juxtapositions of style that continually catch the listener off guard. Yet there are no musical loose ends: This is a score subtly patterned, intricately woven, where farce and tragedy become the same thing.

Ligeti’s music of the past two decades has been post-”Macabre,” or, as Paul Griffith puts it in his informative 1983 monograph on the composer, it is written “after doomsday . . . in the grey twilight of the opera’s closing scene.” This music has included some of Ligeti’s most successful and immediately striking scores.

In these late works, especially those with piano, the notion of mechanical music is still dominant, but it has taken on a decidedly Bachian cast. In works like the alternately glittering and ruminative Horn Trio, the spectacular Etudes for piano and the alternatively ironic and laconic Piano Concerto--the three post-”Macabre” works on the Philharmonic series--Ligeti calls his style “conservative / postmodern,” which is probably something Bach could have said of his own transcendentally conservative music at the end of the Baroque era.

The fact is that while Ligeti’s voice is instantly recognizable, the style has become unclassifiable. Ligeti has absorbed most of the advanced techniques of this century’s music, but he has not typically assembled them together in collage or ironic melange. Instead, in examining what makes them tick, he has distilled them. Nor is his sense of irony postmodern, the product of one who looks at the century with detachment. It is just the opposite, the irony of one who’s connection to the century’s seminal events has been so strong that this may be the only non-maudlin way to express what he has experienced and what he knows.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Ligeti in L.A.: Beyond ‘2001’ The “Around Ligeti” festival runs through May 24. Highlights include:

L.A. Philharmonic: Requiem, today, 2:30 p.m.; Wednesday, 7:30 p.m. “Atmospheres,’ “Lontano,’ Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Piano Concerto, May 22-23, 8 p.m.; May 24, 2:30 p.m. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $8-$63.

Green Umbrella: “Mysteries of the Macabre,” “Aventures,” “Nouvelles Aventures,” April 27, 8 p.m. Japan America Theatre, 244 S. San Pedro. $15-$20.

Chamber Music Society: Horn Trio, Etudes for solo piano (Pierre-Laurent Aimard), May 18, 8 p.m. Gindi Auditorium, University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive. $25.

Free Events: “Ligeti Lite,” a lecture by Paul Griffiths, with a performance of Horn Trio, today, 11 a.m. Roundtable discussion with Steven Stucky and Christopher Hailey, with performances of Six Bagatelles and Ten Pieces for wind quintet, next Sunday, 11 a.m. “Gyorgy Ligeti and ‘Le Grand Macabre’,” a photo exhibit by photographer Guy Vivien, through May 24. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave.

For information on all events: (213) 365-3500.