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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2023

The art of illusion and ambiguity : A comparison between Ligeti’s musical pieces and Escher’s graphical works

Résumé

The Dutch engraver Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) and the Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) both built up a singular body of work by staging all manner of illusions, paradoxes, ambiguities and other kind of captious phenomena. Deceiving the perception is a major concern for both artists. In an interview with Pierre Michel, Ligeti explains that he has discovered Escher’s drawings in 1972 and underlines that they had a very important influence on him. But the composer was already exploring the idea of trompe-l’oreille for years. On can hear for example a kind of infinite fall in Omaggio a G. Frescobaldi (1953) for organ. While an intern at the WDR studio in Cologne (1957-1958), Ligeti composed three electronic works. They constitute a small portion of his oeuvre, but his experiences in the studio were crucial for his stylistic development. Ligeti was profoundly impacted for example by Gottfried Michael Koenig’s research on ‘Bewegungsfarbe’, informally translated as ‘sound colour in motion’ or ‘timbre in motion’. He used this process by which discrete sound events are played so fast as to become continuous, in his electronic pieces before transposing it into acoustic works like Atmosphères (1961) for orchestra or Continuum (1968) for harpsichord which also involve various rhythmic illusions. During this communication we will first recall, in an historical perspective, how Ligeti seems to have always been attracted by trompe-l’oreille effects. Then, we will outline the context in which he discovered Escher’s artwork in 1972 and will discuss its impact on his creative process. To do that we will study some visual effects created by Escher in his graphical works and will compare them to auditory effects in some Ligeti’s instrumental works.
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Dates et versions

halshs-04346840, version 1 (15-12-2023)

Licence

Paternité - CC BY 4.0

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-04346840 , version 1

Citer

François-Xavier Féron. The art of illusion and ambiguity : A comparison between Ligeti’s musical pieces and Escher’s graphical works. Ligeti 1923-2023 – Composition as invention, between memory and experimentation, Conservatory of Milan, Nov 2023, Milan (Italie), Italy. ⟨halshs-04346840⟩
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Dernière date de mise à jour le 12/05/2024
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