Atmosphères

Atmosphères is a piece for orchestra, composed by György Ligeti in 1961. It is noted for eschewing conventional melody and metre in favor of dense sound textures. After Apparitions, it was the second piece Ligeti wrote to exploit what he called a "micropolyphonic" texture. It gained further exposure after being used in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Atmosphères was commissioned in 1961 by the Southwest German Radio (SWF) and had its world premiere on 22 October 1961 by Hans Rosbaud conducting the SWF Symphony Orchestra at the Donaueschingen Festival. Ligeti dedicated the piece to the memory of Mátyás Seiber, a fellow Hungarian-born composer who had been killed in a car crash the previous year. The SWF recorded this performance for broadcast, and this recording has been released commercially on CD several times. Paul Griffiths writes that this performance made Ligeti a "talking point". Ligeti says that after this and his earlier piece Apparitions, he "became famous".
Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York premiere in 1964 with the New York Philharmonic and recorded it with them at the Manhattan Center in New York on 6 January 1964 for Columbia Masterworks, reissued in 1968 on Columbia Records, and in 1999 on a Sony Classical CD.
Atmosphères is scored for an orchestra with the following instrumentation.
Atmosphères eschews conventional melody, harmony, and rhythm, in favor of "sound masses" with sliding and merging orchestral clusters that suggest timbre is the central focus of the piece. It exemplifies Ligeti's notion of "static, self-contained music without either development or traditional rhythmic configurations." Harold Kaufman has written that Ligeti's music collapses foreground and background elements of musical structure into a "magma of evolving sound".
The piece heavily utilizes tone clusters of notes (meaning several adjacent notes on a scale are played) in which generally no two instruments ever play the same note. The popular music edition All Music Guide describes the piece as having clusters of notes from which sections fall out, leaving "masses of natural notes". The piece features "shimmering rapid vibrato, multiple high glissandi, waves of string harmonics in different metres, [and] notes moving along the same path but at different speeds".
Program notes provided by Ensemble Sospeso describe Atmosphères as the "first major alternative to European serialism: static masses of orchestral sound that give the simultaneous sense of immobility and motion." On the other hand, a close investigation of Ligeti's relationship to the Darmstadt avant-garde concludes that Atmosphères should "be seen as part of an evolution within the serial tradition and a response to problems articulated within it, rather than as a break from that tradition altogether". The sound masses in Atmosphères are seen particularly to conform to the serial precepts of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "statistical form", as exemplified in Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) and Gruppen (1955–57).
The piece evokes a sense of timelessness in which the listener is lost in a web of texture and tonality. Harald Kaufmann has described it as "acoustically standing still", a stationary sound that has movement within it that is similar to breathing. The classical music edition of All Music Guide says the music "scarcely hints at forward movement. Rather the listener hears an all but motionless series of sound evolutions unfolding at various moments". According to Peter Laki:
Larry Sitsky has written that in Ligeti's music "the density of the successive structures is such that the conventional parameters through which musical form (melody, rhythm, harmony) is traditionally perceived appear to have been evacuated. Consequently, these evolving sound structures seem stationary, as if detached from the passage of time. To paraphrase the composer himself, the micropolyphonic textures tend to hang like a mighty oriental tapestry, suspended outside time." Likewise, Thomas May states that in his breakthrough orchestral pieces Apparitions and Atmosphères Ligeti's "new musical point of view... looked beyond the traditional basic elements of melody, harmony, and rhythm, immobilizing these in favor of the mass and texture of sound itself. Gigantic clusters of chords hover in a stasis that negates familiar signposts of harmony and pulse. This dense sound-fog became known as the signature Ligeti style".
In an essay titled "Metamorphoses of Musical Form", Ligeti developed the concept of musical "permeability" according to which a musical structure is "permeable" if it allows a free choice of intervals and "impermeable" if not. Ligeti here considers Palestrina's music as having "perhaps the lowest degree of permeability" because its handling of consonance and dissonance was the most sensitively defined of all historical styles. Ligeti saw permeability and impermeability of groups, structures, and textures in serial music as substitutes for the form-shaping function of melodic lines, motifs, and harmonies in older styles. Some textures could be layered and juxtaposed; some musical structures will mix with others seamlessly, while other structures will stand out.
Atmospheres exemplifies much of Ligeti's theory suspending harmony in favor of sustained sounds. The piece opens with a "fully chromatic cluster covering more than five octaves, held by strings and soft woodwinds", out of which various groups of instruments drop out successively, followed by various "strands of sonic fabric" reenter the composition, first white notes then black notes along with shifts in timbre and duration of notes that drive the piece forward. Consequently, Griffiths writes, "the whole piece is a study in what Ligeti's essay had called the 'permeability' of musical structures, how some will mix with a great many others, some stand always apart; it is also a demonstration of what can be achieved when all the usual regulators, being so finely tuned at the time by other composers, are left open."
Ligeti noted that Atmosphères had a polyphonic structure, but one organized by his own rules. The polyphonic structure, he stated, cannot be heard by the listener, but remains "underwater", hidden from the listener. Ligeti coined the term "micropolyphony" to describe this texture.
Stanley Kubrick chose this piece and others by Ligeti for the scenes in deep space and those with the monolith in his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey because its quality of mystery was a good sonic realization of his vision. This resulted in the exposure of Ligeti's music to a much wider audience. The recording of Atmosphères used in the soundtrack to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was with the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ernest Bour. Kubrick would go on to employ other Ligeti compositions in his films The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.
According to program notes published by the San Francisco Symphony, Ligeti was not pleased that his music occurred in a film soundtrack shared by composers Johann and Richard Strauss. Nevertheless, the piece has been performed in concert several times with other works featured in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, such as a 2010 performance by the Nashville Symphony, which performed it along with the full-length version of Richard Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra.
A 2006 performance of Atmosphères by the London Philharmonic Orchestra was noted for its direct transition without interruption into Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Sunday Times music critic Hugh Canning described as a "stroke of programming genius", continuing:
Edward Seckerson of UK's The Independent also described this segue as a "startling coup" while Richard Morrison of the daily edition of The Times noted that "Jurowski even kept a beat going, to fool us ... so that Stravinsky's bassoon emerged out of Ligeti's wispy, endlessly drifting clouds of clusters."
Another recently acclaimed performance was that by Austria's Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester (Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra) performing in England, a performance described as "a focused reading" in which the conductor "Nott duly coerced a delicacy from each section of the orchestra—particularly the centrifugal strings—that gave a wonderful smoothness to the performance".
Belgian classical guitarist Tom Pauwels wrote a reduced arrangement of Atmosphères for a small chamber orchestra of eight instruments, using a graphic score for clarinet, cello, accordion, guitar and laptop (sine tones) based on the Ligeti original. It has been performed by Plus-minus ensemble, and posted by the ensemble as a video.
In chronological order of recording, many of which have been released in different couplings.
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