Transcription
Hi everybody, in this video I will talk about one of the most beautiful vocal compositions ever written, called Lux Aeterna. It was composed in 1966 by György Ligeti, who is one of my favorite composers and would’ve turned 100 this year.
Not too long ago, I heard the piece live for the very first time in a church in Berlin, and it was a truly mesmerizing experience. I think that it’s a really accessible and enjoyable piece of 20th-century music, and maybe some of you don’t know it yet. So let’s get right into Lux Aeterna.
Now, before we talk about Lux Aeterna, I have to mention the piece Ligeti wrote right before that, which is his amazing Requiem for vocal soloists, choir, and orchestra, and is one of his most extraordinary pieces. He started writing it in the spring of 1963, and it took him 2 years to complete it. As you might know, a requiem is a mass for the dead, and it’s one of the oldest parts of Catholic liturgy. Ligeti wasn’t religious, but he was fascinated by everything associated with a Requiem, namely death, apocalypse, and so on, but also the earlier Requiems of music history. Maybe his lifelong obsession with dark themes like that comes partly from his early confrontations with human atrocities. He lived through a fascist and a Stalinist dictatorship and witnessed horrible things, including the death of his brother and his father.
But coming back to the requiem, according to the Roman Catholic Church, the mass for the dead consists of 9 musical parts. When composers write Requiems, they usually don’t include all of these. Ligeti’s Requiem consists of 4 movements: Introiutus, Kyrie, De die judicii sequentia, and Lacrimosa; the last two movements are derived from the Dies Irae.
Now, as you can see, in the mass for the dead, the last part is where the Lux Aeterna text appears. It’s basically a prayer asking for peace for the deceased people; Lux Aeterna meaning eternal light in Latin. I found various translations, and I’m not really sure which one is the best, but I’ll show you three of them; maybe one of you can tell me. I’ll read one of them: “May light eternal shine upon them, O Lord, with Thy Saints for evermore: for Thou art gracious. Eternal rest give to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them: With Thy Saints for evermore, for Thou art gracious.” We will later see how this text structures the piece, although it is often barely intelligible.
So, Ligeti composed his piece Lux Aeterna in 1966, shortly after he composed his Requiem, and although the piece definitely stands for itself, it can be seen as some sort of afterthought of the Requiem. It was commissioned by Clytus Gottwald for the Schola Cantorum Stuttgart, which was a specialized ensemble for new choral music. Gottwald’s letter reached Ligeti at the time he was seriously ill in a Viennese hospital, recovering slowly from an emergency operation for his perforated intestine, during which it seems he had come “close to death.” He was so heavily sedated with morphine that he remained addicted to it for three years afterwards; and for two months, was so little aware of reality that he was not allowed to go alone into the street. But if Lux Aeterna is “psychedelic music composed in a drug-induced trance,” he had not lost his analytical faculties. Almost at once, after reading Gottwald’s letter, Ligeti had a vision of “extremely clear” euphonious harmonies, and wrote an outline of the pitch structure.
Lux Aeterna is written for 16 mixed a cappella voices and lasts approximately 9 minutes. It’s a really enchanting piece, which immediately sucks you into its wonderful sound world and absorbing flow. Let’s dive into the score and see how this sonority and movement is actually created. I will talk a lot about the first section of the piece, because there are many things that are important for the whole piece. After that, we’ll go faster over the next sections of the piece.
The piece starts with a long expansion process. We start with a single note, an F, and slowly more and more surrounding notes appear. As you can see, the dynamic is very quiet throughout, and in addition to that, Ligeti writes that the voice entries should be very gentle. The tempo marking is sostenuto, molto calmo, and from afar. Down below he explains that what he means by that more concretely is that the singers should never accentuate any note. All these playing indications play a crucial role in creating this very soft, almost angelic sound world, as well as the flowing quality of the piece.
Now let’s take a closer look at this expansion process. The piece begins with an emergence of an expanding sound texture. First, one soprano and one alto sing the same F. Three other sopranos and altos join in soon thereafter. They all sing the word “Lux.” As you can see, all voices sing rather continuously; there is never a hole in the overall sound. This ensures the flowing, continuous quality of the piece. You can also notice how all the voices have different rhythms. Every voice enters and stops at slightly different moments. This gives the sound texture an inner movement; it never stays the same. Different voices always have different sound colors, and with this rhythmic displacement of the voices, the texture is constantly changing slightly, because one voice enters here and stops there, while another one enters there and stops at another moment, and so on. The way in which Ligeti composed the rhythms of the voices also creates a sort of very subtle, irregular beating inside the texture, because each time a voice enters and disappears we hear a minimal crescendo and decrescendo. Although Ligeti writes that the voices should enter very gently, you can still hear it, also because of the text they sing; you can often hear the “l” of “lux.”
This brings me to another interesting aspect of the piece, and it concerns the acoustic phenomenon of beating. So I just talked about a kind of composed beating effect, which is maybe not the perfect wording, but what I mean is, as I’ve said, the inner movement of the texture through constant entering and disappearing of different voices. Now there is also a real physical phenomenon called beating, which occurs when two tones which are just slightly different are heard at the same time. “In acoustics, a beat is an interference pattern between two sounds of slightly different frequencies, perceived as a periodic variation in volume whose rate is the difference of the two frequencies.” So, for example, let’s say I have a frequency of 349 Hz. Now listen to a frequency of 350 Hz. The beating occurs when I play both simultaneously. Now, of course, in Lux Aeterna it’s not that clear; we have moving human voices and not steady sine waves, but I think that it definitely plays a role in the kind of glowing sound texture of the piece. It happens right from the beginning. Because it is basically impossible for two singers to sing and stay on exactly the pitch, when we have 8 voices singing an F, there will be very small microtonal differences between them, which can create this very subtle beating effect. How much you really hear it also depends on the interpretation and how much vibrato the singers use, for example. Listen to these two very different examples. The beating also happens, maybe more obviously, when we have two semitones sounding at the same time, which brings me back to the expansion process.
You can see that new notes appear from bar 4 onwards. First, we have an E, which is sung with the new word, “aeterna,” then a G comes in, an F sharp, and so on. So neighbor tones of F natural appear one after another; a harmonic expansion is happening. A harmonic field around the note F emerges, and because of the movement of the different voices it’s in constant motion. This harmonic expansion also implies an expansion of register and more importantly an imaginary spatial expansion. And generally, spatial associations are very important in Lux Aeterna and in Ligeti’s music overall. Vertically this process generates cluster chords, but if you look at the harmonies in this whole passage, you will notice that they are quite diatonic. It’s way less chromatic than earlier pieces of Ligeti; also in the voice leading, this plays a huge role for the soothing sound world. This moving harmonic field reaches its lower limit with the D flat in bar 9 and its upper limit with the C natural in bar 13; it spans a major seventh.
Ligeti himself describes the harmonic process quite well: “The particularity of this harmony is that successive chords are rarely connected to one another. Rather, a gradual, almost continuous transformation from one harmony to another takes place, in such a way that within a stationary harmonic field, first one ‘foreign’ tone appears, then a second one, a third one, and so on, until the initial harmonic field gets blurred. Throughout this blurring, the tones of the next harmonic field already shine through, at first concealed, then gradually more distinctly, until the tones of the initial field disappear completely and solely the new harmony is present.”
Also quite interestingly, Ligeti composed this whole passage, as well as other ones, as a canon. It is a purely pitch-based canon, which means that the pitches that each voice sings are the same, but other things like the rhythms differ, as we saw. Jonathan W. Bernard analyzed these canonic structures in his article “Voice Leading as a Spatial Function in the Music of Ligeti,” if you want to get more details about it. The canonic structure is not directly perceivable though; it’s more of a composer’s tool. The polyphony in this piece forms a dense web in which you can’t really discern the individual lines but rather their interweaving and the overall texture they create together. Ligeti used this kind of polyphony in different ways in many of his works and called it micropolyphony. Here is a quote of his, where he speaks about two other pieces, but it also applies for Lux Aeterna and various other pieces of his: “Technically speaking, I have always approached musical texture through part-writing. Both Atmosphères and Lontano have a dense canonic structure. But you cannot actually hear the polyphony, the canon. You hear a kind of impenetrable texture, something like a very densely woven cobweb. I have retained melodic lines in the process of composition; they are governed by rules as strict as Palestrina’s or those of the Flemish school, but the rules of this polyphony are worked out by me. The polyphonic structure does not come through; you cannot hear it; it remains hidden in a microscopic, underwater world, to us inaudible. I call it micropolyphony (such a beautiful word!).”
Before we listen, I’ll mention another thing that I quite like: it’s all the endings of the word “lux”; you always hear little “xs” here and there, which add this very subtle, noisy sound to the musical texture, like a very quiet hissing. Now let’s listen.
So, in bar 24 something exciting happens. The first tenor and soprano come in and sing an A in octaves on the word “Luceat,” which means “shine.” And this octave really shines through; this is one of the moments where Ligeti composed according to the meaning of the text. This is the first moment two voices enter at the same time. The octave is held steadily for 13 bars and creates a new layer. In addition to the constantly moving harmonic net structure we had before, now this clear and static octave appears. It is also sung by more and more sopranos and tenors, while the altos keep singing similarly to before. Now, this octave, this second layer, differentiates itself from the harmonic net structure of before, through its immobility and through its range, which is also linked to dynamics because the sopranos can’t sing this high A in the same dynamic as the notes before; it will always be a bit louder. This passage can again be perceived quite spatially. It is as if the octave is in another place spatially than the harmonic net structure. In another way, Bernard mentions the aerating effect of this high A and the empty space it opens up. The empty space he means is between this high A and the highest point of the harmonic net. His graph of the pitch development of Lux Aeterna does a good job at representing this. The entry and taking over of this octave can also be seen as a transition to the second section of the piece, which we will talk about after listening to this passage. Notice also that, when listening to this octave being sung by different singers, you can clearly hear the subtle changes in tone color and even intonation I mentioned before. “The ‘aerating’ effect of the A5 - the empty space it opens up and the emulation it seems to provoke in the lower, previously densely occupied region - seems also to lead to the sonority given by the basses falsetti beginning in b.37.”
So this was the first large section of the piece. The second section begins clearly with the entry of the bass voices singing the word “domine.” All the sections of the piece are quite evident through entries of specific voice groups and the text. What’s noteworthy here is that Ligeti writes very high notes for the basses, which results in a very particular sound color, because they sing in their highest register. They also stay on the same pitches and sing homophonically; that is, all voices have the same rhythm, in contrast to the polyphonic voice leading of the first section. Here the basses sing a chord consisting of a minor third and a major second, an intervallic structure that is often used and important in the piece, as stated by Ligeti himself. In bar 39 the tenors join in with the continuation of the text. The entry is very clear; they come in together just like the basses did, but then move in different rhythms, like the sopranos and altos did in the first section. Also, similarly, the tenors’ pitch material is organized in a canonic structure, as Bernard shows. They start on an F sharp and then move downwards in a meandering motion. The basses pause and reenter in bar 46, now also moving similarly to the tenors. The texture here is like the one in the first section of the piece; the main difference being the registers of the voices. We had the high voices in the first section, and now we have the lower ones. The way Ligeti uses and combines the different voice types is really important for the articulation of the form of the piece, as well as the variety of the sound world. He makes sure to contrast the different voice types, to always change the combinations of voice groups, and to use the same voice types in their different registers.
Now we can take a brief look at a related passage in Ligeti’s Requiem. In his writings about Lux Aeterna, Ligeti writes: “The musical vision of the ‘everlasting light,’ of a state that was always present, that barely changes and will persist forever, goes back to a parallel section in the Requiem: The line of the text ‘Et lux perpetua luceat eis’ of the ‘Introitus’ is composed in a very similar way; Lux Aeterna is therefore a further development of the musical conception of this ‘Introitus’ passage.” You will notice the similarities of the texture and voice leading of this passage, but in this case only the basses sing in a very low register, and they’re accompanied by the lowest instruments of the orchestra. Let’s listen to this daunting passage.
Now back to Lux Aeterna, the polyphonic texture of the tenors and basses continues while becoming a bit calmer, until this beautiful moment in bar 61 arrives. Here, the sopranos and altos come back in, entering simultaneously with the basses, singing this daunting chord on the word “Requiem.” The chord consists of the intervals I mentioned before, a minor third and a major second; in this case, G, B flat, and C. This intervallic structure and the fact that Ligeti doubles different tones in various octaves makes this chord somewhat soft, shining, and a bit unsettling at the same time. This is also where the third canon starts, while the second one still goes on, as Bernard says: “The next passage (bs 61-79), which takes in the entire duration of Canon 3, is unique in Lux Aeterna: the only place at which two different canons unfold simultaneously. The listener should have no great difficulty grasping the fact that the two are different, owing to the registral separation.” The chord changes quickly, as the voices start moving around almost immediately. As you can see and hear, the polyphonic texture here is similar to before, but it moves more slowly; there are many long held notes. This whole passage is actually the most dense part of the piece; it’s the only moment where all 16 voices sing at the same time. It’s also quite in the middle of the piece, and the sung line is probably the most important one of the whole text. The voices sing “Requiem aeternam dona eis,” which means “give them eternal rest,” and is the core of the text. So this whole passage starting from bar 61 is really a crucial moment of the piece. It really sounds mesmerizing, and I’m always amazed by how much it doesn’t sound like human voices sometimes. I often think that certain moments sound like singing glasses or even like electronic music. Anyway, take a listen and hear for yourselves.
As you’ve heard, at the end of this passage, the texture becomes more static; the different voice groups fade away one after the other, and the harmony thins out until only one note is left. I found this analysis of Lux Aeterna by Jan Jarvlepp online. I think his visualization of the form is quite good and clear. So this is where we’re at right now; we’ve passed the moment of maximum density.
In bar 87 the basses enter singing “domine,” initiating the next section of the piece. This moment is clearly related to bar 37. If you remember, the second section of the piece started with the basses singing “domine” in a high register and homophonically. Here in bar 87 they do the same, but this time in the low register and with different notes. This parallelity can be explained by the text. Not only are the basses singing the same word “domine,” but the whole two sentences are very similar: “Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.” And musically there are other similarities as well. In bar 90 the altos enter singing “et lux perpetua luceat eis” in a similar polyphonic fashion as they did with the sopranos in the first section. In bar 94 the sopranos and tenors come in with this shining B natural octave singing the word “luceat.” As you remember, the same happened in the first section. The difference here is the slightly higher note and the fact that all four sopranos and tenors enter simultaneously. Another small detail is the omission of the last consonant “t.” In order to create a very soft and smooth ending, Ligeti writes to omit the “t,” which would make the sound a bit harder. This is a small but important indication, since “luceat” will actually be the last sung word. In bar 101 the basses enter, and later in bar 110 the sopranos join as well. They sing held notes, creating a more static texture. The music slowly calms down; we feel it coming to an end. The sopranos and basses fade out again, leaving the altos singing this final major second on the word “luceat,” in their very low register, which has this dark and frail sound color, before the piece ends with 7 measures of silence.
In his text about the piece, Ligeti writes that this music evokes the idea of eternity; one has the impression that the music was there before we heard it and that it will continue being there eternally, even if we don’t hear it anymore.
I hope this video was interesting to you, and I encourage you to listen to the entire piece now, to compare different interpretations, develop your own thoughts about it, and so on. I’m also happy to answer questions or anything else in the comments, and if you’re interested in Ligeti, you can check out my two very long videos about him on my channel. So thanks for watching, and you’ll see me in the next video, hopefully soon!