2. Space-Time Movements in György Ligeti’s Piano Concerto: Polymeter and Conflicting Meter in Historical and Intercultural Perspective

The polyglot, boundary-defying conceptions of György Ligeti, driven by artistic curiosity, have been widely praised, and his collected writings published in German posthumously in 2007 impressively demonstrate the rhizome-like ramifications of his thinking in and about music, as also aptly demonstrated by the polymorphic vividness of the structures in his music since Apparitions (1958–59). From the very beginning, Ligeti, in his own energetic manner, absorbed impulses from often heterogeneous areas of the arts and sciences, and idiosyncratically interwove them into an asymmetrical, open maze of sounds and thoughts. Still, it should be emphasized how intensively, but also “art-typically” Ligeti engaged with scientific thinking, especially since the beginning of the 1980s, for example in the areas of chaos theory, fractal geometry, and artificial intelligence. At the beginning of his essay “Paradigmenwechsel der achtziger Jahre” (1988), Ligeti emphasizes that he does not write “‘scientific’ music, do[es] not use calculations, nor algorithms [...], realize[s] only [his] own ideas, but deal[s] with analogous ideas from other areas. Complexity or complex patterns have always attracted [him].”74 Not least, Ligeti’s view of European or indeed “global” music history was given new impetus by these search movements (for example, through the discovery of the ars subtilior) and a no less consequential turn toward music genres from Africa, Java, Bali, Melanesia, China, and Korea, with their specific structures and underlying ways of thinking.75 The reception of sub-Saharan African genres, which include the ensembles of ongo horns of the Central African Banda Linda, songs of the Aka pygmies, the kiganda music of the amadinda xylophones in Uganda as well as the mbira lamellophone music of the Shona in Zimbabwe, form just one layer in an eclectic chain of associations in Ligeti’s thinking and compositions in the 1980s. As outlined earlier in this book, intercultural reception processes in European music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have often been (and still are) integrated into comparably universalist aesthetic-conceptual designs, reaching out in a self-ref lexive and complex manner in the most diverse directions and determining a reception model that I have attempted to characterize with the term “interpenetration” (→ II.6). Such reception strategies proceed structurally, associatively, and transformatively and are based on analogous formations and cross-connections between different contexts and discourses – something that is particularly characteristic of Ligeti’s approach. In the case of sub-Saharan music, Ligeti’s particular interest was in gestalt paradoxes and illusionary effects, which are also ref lected in fractal geometry or M. C. Escher’s visual paradoxes, such as the waterfall or staircase, which seem to be constantly falling or rising but in