Ligeti and Jeux: The Influence of Debussy via the Darmstadt Avant-garde

Jennifer Iverson, University of Texas at Austin

Ligeti has always maintained that his musical ideas for the sound-mass works such as Apparitions (1958-59) and Atmosphères (1961) were formed in Hungary during his youth and apprenticeship. However, it is important to remember that Ligeti acquired the tools to realize his ideas only after his emigration and exposure to Western avant-gardist influences. In this paper, I focus on the Darmstadt composers' fascination with Debussy's Jeux, arguing that it was a critical work for Ligeti's development of his mature style. Because of the near-absence of a reception history around Jeux's 1913 premiere, Jeux was a fertile piece for revitalization, and the Darmstadt composers made Jeux revolutionary by ascribing great significance to it. I read Ligeti's Apparitions (1958-59) and Aventures (1962-65) as interactions with Jeux as it was understood amongst the Darmstadt avant-garde. Many of Ligeti's comments about Jeux are indebted to Stockhausen's and Eimert's published analyses and there is much evidence to suggest that Ligeti knew these articles. I interrogate Eimert's understanding of Jeux's quasi-rondo form and "vegetative" motivic development, showing how Ligeti reapplied these ideas in Apparitions. I argue for the profound influence of Stockhausen's statistical form, which Stockhausen developed with respect to Jeux and communicated to Ligeti. I show how Ligeti applied ideas of large-scale directional motion and statistical distribution of pitches in twelve-tone rows in Aventures (1962-65). It is clear that Ligeti did not simply recompose Jeux, yet Ligeti's early mature works bear the influence of the Darmstadt composers' collective fetishization of Jeux.