Tonight Taka Kigawa will perform the complete Ligeti piano études at le Poisson Rouge. The first étude from the first book is titled Désordre (1985) and is dedicated to Pierre Boulez. Written when the composer was 62, Désordre appears between the Trio for violin, horn, and piano, and the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra on Ligeti’s list of works, indicating a period of intense preoccupation with the piano (after a gap of 30 years in writing for the solo instrument). Ligeti’s first book of piano études received the Grawemeyer Award in 1986.
An inspiration for Ligeti in this period was (among other things) African music: “In autumn 1982 a former student of mine, the Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra, brought to my attention a collection of instrumental and vocal ensemble music of the Banda-Linda tribe from the Central African Republic, recorded by Simha Arom. The record ’Banda Polyphonies’, then several years old, was no longer available so I re-recorded it on to a cassette and made a photocopy of Arom’s introductory text. Having never before heard anything quite like it, I listened to it repeatedly and was then, as I still am, deeply impressed by this marvelous polyphonic, polyrhythmic music with its astonishing complexity.”
Jeremy Denk says of the études: “…one stroke of their genius is underappreciated: the way Ligeti celebrates the genre’s perversity, repurposes it into wild, unheard-of art. Drawing inspiration from the étude’s most unpromising attributes—obsession, monotony, ad infinitum repetition, mathematical dryness—he fearlessly redeems them.” (https://jeremydenk.net/ligeti_beethoven.php)
The Abjad notation library is used to generate material in the style of Désordre here: (http://abjad.mbrsi.org/literature_examples/ligeti.html)
Ligeti Étude Nr. 1: Désordre