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Abstract
At the turn of the twentieth century, György Ligeti's late piano music was performed in various European concert halls alongside music of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa. The acclaimed project culminated in a CD on the Teldec label entitled Ligeti/Reich: African Rhythms (Pierre Laurent Aimard/Aka Pygmies) featuring works by Ligeti, alongside works by Steve Reich and music of the Aka. This paper describes and evaluates the uneven critical reception of the project in relation to the precise formal connections between Ligeti's etudes, on the one hand, and the music of the Aka, in particular, and African music, in general, on the other. It traces some of the African citations in Ligeti's etudes to specific source materials, briefly describes the original function and context of the music (even if they are not demonstrably known by the composer), and assesses the ideological dimensions implicit in the way the African materials are put to use in a Western context.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Paul Sacher Institut and the Princeton University Society of Fellows for their generous assistance in writing this essay.
Notes
[1] The concert title Diesseits von Afrika probably resonates with the massively successful film Jenseits von Afrika, the German translation of the Oscar award-winning film Out of Africa, released six years earlier in 1985. Out of Africa is an autobiographical fiction based on the book by Isak Dinesen and Karen von Blixen, also known as ‘Tania Blixen’, and was published in London in 1937 and in New York in 1938. The story is set in the early twentieth century (1913 to 1931), when Europeans had settled most of the grasslands of Kenya (then known as British East Africa). It tells the story of Danish Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke's life on a coffee plantation, entangled in a network of relationships with her unfaithful husband (Bror Blixen), her true love (Denys Finch-Hatton), and the local natives. Although the author aspires, through Karen's lyrical travails, to demonstrate a deeper understanding and respect for African culture by the end of the story, the writing is inevitably filtered through an aristrocratic frame, resulting in little more than an invented idea of African culture. The Kenyan novelist and critic Ngugi wa Thiong'o considers Blixen's novel to be a crude racist attempt to ‘define the colonized world for the European colonizer’ (Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Citation1981, p. 16).
[2] This point was made in a personal communication with the Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra.
[3] On the invention of African rhythmic complexity, see Agawu, 2003.
[4] As an inversion of the film title Jenseits von Afrika, it is possible that the concert attempts to distance itself from the lyrical exoticism of Blixen's imagined Africa.
[5] Reich is not clear about what ‘thinking African’ might mean, but tends to describe his dealings with African music in the metaphorics of ‘musical structure’ (about which more later in this article).
[6] Reich's writings offer an equivocal presentation of the music's philosophical import, which sometimes will vividly conflate ‘structure’ and ‘sound’ and other times will vividly oppose them. First, the idea that ‘structural’ borrowing is less ideologically charged than is ‘sonic’ borrowing is debatable. Second, Reich's compositional methods of borrowing from African music may not be ‘structural’ at all (even as in the terms set by the composer) as they most immediately involve quotations of rhythmic patterns from Africa. Most importantly, Reich's valuation of ‘structure’ over ‘sound’ (when it comes to describing his use of African music) contradicts a foundational aesthetic idea in his groundbreaking essay ‘Music as a gradual process’ (Reich, Citation2000, pp. 34 – 36). In this essay we find an outright dismissal of the traditional opposition between structure and sound. He writes, ‘What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing’ (ibid., p. 35). The two pieces on the African Rhythms CD, Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood, at once outright quotations of African music and pure ‘compositional processes’, bear the marks of this contradiction.
[7] Ngugi wa Thiong'o's criticism of Blixen's novel also makes special mention of her demeaning use of animal imagery to describe native Africans. He points to a passage that compares the actions of Blixen's servant (Kamante) to those of ‘a civilized dog, that has lived for a long time with people’ (Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Citation1981, p. 18). As it is with Ngugi's critique of Blixen, Schomann's use of animal imagery demeans the Africans he claims to extol.
[8] Discussions of overarching African traits in music risk recapitulating the incoherent idea that such general traits actually exist. As will become clear by the end of this article, Ligeti's African influences can be traced to individual traditions that happen to be based in the African continent. I use the false generalization, ‘Africa’, as a strategically useful political bloc.
[9] To this extent, Ligeti's music is deconstructive, yielding to what Derrida calls the ‘oblique’ resonance of the ‘tympanum’; music that ‘repercusses its … limit … in sonorous representation’; music that ‘attempts to think th[e] unheard-of thought’ (Derrida, Citation1982, pp. xiii, xix, 22).
[10] See, for example, Simha Arom's collection Musiques Banda, Musée de l'Homme, Vogue LD 765 (1971).
[11] On the topic of African music, Ligeti writes, ‘When I become interested in something, it becomes a passion’ (‘Wenn ich anfange, mich für etwas zu interessieren, wird daraus eine Leidenschaft’) (Ligeti, Citation2003b, p. 136).
[12] Ligeti sharply distances himself from these two compositional schools: ‘In composition we find the dichotomy between modern and post-modern (or avant garde and postmodernist), as in the arts. I feel outside of this. Even though I once belonged, to a small extent, to the Darmstadt circle: I am no follower of the avant garde; I was never a dogmatic defender of a particular direction’ (‘Es gibt in der Komposition die Dichotomie zwischen modern und post-modern (oder Avantgarde und Postmoderne), auch in den anderen Künsten. Ich fühle mich außerhalb. Obwohl ich mal ein wenig zum Darmstädter Kreis gehörte: ich bin kein Anhänger der Avantgarde, war nie dogmatischer Verfechter einer Richtung’) (in Floros, Citation1996, p. 229).
[13] Although he implausibly compares it to pipe music of the Nama people, Peter Niklas Wilson argues that, of all the etudes, African rhythmic textures are most evident in Fém (Wilson, Citation1992, p. 64); likewise, Steinitz considers Fém to be the etude most obviously influenced by Banda-Linda polyphony (Steinitz, Citation2003, p. 300).
[14] In the score we read, ‘There is no real metre here; the bar lines are only to help synchronization’. On the ambiguities of 12/8 rhythmic patterns in Africa, see, for example, David Locke's Drum Gahu: A Systematic Method for an African Percussion Piece.
[15] On ‘inherent rhythms’, see Kubik (Citation1962).
[16] Ligeti's former student Roberto Sierra introduced the composer to this kind of Latin American pianism in Hamburg in the early 1980s (personal communication with Sierra). See also Arom's illustrations of asymmetrically distributed accents in various rhythmic patterns to clinch a point about contrametricity in African music (Arom, Citation1991, pp. 242, 244).
[17] See for example Kubik's six major articles in Artur Simon's Musik aus Afrika: 20 Beiträge zur Kenntnis traditioneller afrikanischer Musikkulturen (Berlin: Reiter Druck, 1983).
[18] The letters ‘I.R.’ in refer to the music's layered inherent rhythms.
[19] In György Ligeti: Jenseits von Avantgarde und Postmoderne, Floros describes Ligeti's forays into unique pitch collections based on, amongst various musics, the temperament of Chokwe music from Angola (Floros, Citation1996, pp. 74, 76).
[20] Indeed, in his description of the third movement of the piano concerto, Ligeti uses almost exactly the same language as he uses to describe African music: ‘Above a rapid, regular constant fundamental pulsation appear through corresponding asymmetric accentual divisions various kinds of hemiolas and “inherent melodic patterns” (this expression was proposed by Gerhard Kubik with reference to sub-Saharan African music). When played at the correct tempo and with very clear accentuation, there appear in this movement illusionistic rhythmic-melodic shapes' (1988, p. 10).
[21] Ligeti's fascination for music in which the systematic aspect encounters a physical limit is well known. Regarding the piano etudes in particular, he writes: ‘Given the anatomical limitations, it was necessary to allow the music to arise, so to speak, from the position of the ten fingers on the keys’ (Ligeti, Citation1988, p. 6).
[22] In one of the sketches to Entrelacs we read the words ‘Bitonalis Akustikus’: a possible title for the etude? Steinitz refers to Ligeti's complementary construction of pitch-space as ‘combinatorial tonality’ (Steinitz, Citation2003, p. 281).
[23] Interestingly, the process of deformation and divergence is not the result of polymeter alone. Instead, the music gradually becomes deaf to its own structural processes and attuned instead to the actual sound produced by them. Let me explain. When the disaligned metric points of stress coincide, Ligeti—in step with the logic of the technique—adds a third note to that sonority. Consider the way the phasing process produces coincidences at various points in the music. For example, the quarter note and half note polymetric levels of the right hand coincide on the last pulse of m. 12 and again on the seventh pulse of m. 20. On both occasions, Ligeti adds an additional note, and we find a triad. And yet triads begin to appear on non-coinciding points as well, as in mm. 18, 20, 23, 24, and so on. It is as if the music responds to the results of its own logical procedures with destructive literalism. Like a computer virus, the music disassembles its own logic through exaggeration.
[24] Steinitz plausibly illustrates the analogy between Ligeti's music (in this case Désordre) and chaos theory thus: ‘The study replicates a fundamental idea of chaos theory, that tiny differences in initial conditions lead rapidly to a complex outcome’ (Steinitz, Citation2003, pp. 283 – 286). Citing research into computer programs for weather forecasting, Steinitz notes the huge discrepancies found in weather patterns when decimals are rounded off to three decimal places—a phenomenon known as ‘the butterfly effect’ (ibid., p. 286).
[25] Although this sketch is marked ‘Etude X’, it forms part of a collection of sketches that eventually became Etude No. 12.
[26] Other titles considered by Ligeti include ‘Twighlight’, ‘Clair-Obscur’, ‘La Métamorphose’, ‘D'après Escher’, ‘Interférences’, ‘Convexe-Concáve’, ‘The Isle is Full of Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs’, and, as mentioned, ‘Bitonalis Akustikus’. Whether Ligeti was aware that the South African composer Kevin Volans had written a piece entitled ‘Mbira’ is unclear. It is certain, however, that Ligeti knew about Volans's African paraphrase compositions, as indicated by references to the latter in various sketches.
[27] Kubik relates this creative perceptual operation to the art of divination: ‘What the mukakusona begins to see in those structures is in some way comparable to what a diviner (mukakutaha) “sees” in the configuration formed by the little objects in his ngombo (divining basket), although the tusona, of course, have nothing to do with divination’ (Kubik, Citation1987, p. 69).
[28] For an analysis of Reich's uses of African music in It's Gonna Rain (1965), see my ‘Curious Intersections, Uncommon Magic: Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain’, forthcoming in Current Musicology, 79/80, 2006.
[29] To the extent that the issue is addressed, scholars and commentators unfailingly follow Ligeti's statements on the matter, citing the works Continuum and Monument as proof of Ligeti's independent arrival at the composition of ‘inherent patterns’ (see, for example, Burde, Citation1993, p. 185).
