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György Ligeti: ‘Poème Symphonique For 100 Metronomes,’ 1962
08.29.2013
12:40 pm
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Metronomes
 
This film short from György Ligeti, the great Hungarian composer of “contemporary music,” as we still don’t have a proper name for “classical” music composed in our era, dates from 1962. Ligeti is probably best-known for writing “Lux Aeterna,” the eerie vocal accompaniment to the black plinth in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Artforum helpfully expains:
 

The Hungarian composer György Ligeti composed Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes in 1962, during his brief acquaintance with the Fluxus movement. The piece requires ten “performers,” and most of their efforts take place without the audience present. Each of the hundred metronomes is set up on the performance platform, and they are all then wound to their maximum extent and set to different speeds. Once they are all fully wound they are all started as simultaneously as possible. The performers then leave. The audience is then admitted, and take their places while the metronomes are all ticking. As the metronomes wind down one after another and stop, periodicity becomes noticeable in the sound, and individual metronomes can be more clearly made out. The piece typically ends with just one metronome ticking alone for a few beats.

 
Judging from the way it sounds, the piece could be titled “10 Buxom Dames in the Sterling Cooper Steno Pool” and it would mostly be pretty similar.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Looking at Ligeti

Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.29.2013
12:40 pm
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