Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

This is a delayed blog, and yep, thats right, I’m doing a blog on Atmospheres. Hopefully I’ll be able to contribute something new that hasn’t already been said.

When I was listening to the piece on my own after we had listened to it in class, I had forgotten how the piece had started. When I started the file on my iPod, there was a slight lag in the playback, so I thought maybe the piece had been a gradual crescendo to start. However, when the opening chord actually hit, I was somewhat startled, not because it was loud at all, but because the chord was so unexpected for me. The beginning is intriguing because of the relative ambiguity of the motion of the music; I did not know where the piece would lead.

Through the first half of the piece, I had this vision in my head of a bubble vibrating in space, and the expansion and contraction of its walls from the inside. There was a sense of delicacy and unease to the music, but certain passages seemed to override this sense and “smooth” the bubble, especially at 1:59. The bubble then began to stretch at the 3:20 mark, but the low blast at 3:43 seemed to be a force weighing down tremendously on the bottom of the bubble, and the echoing sounds around the bubble intensified until it burst at around the 4:50 mark. Suddenly, I had an image of many metal blocks and objects grinding and pushing against each other, until they started gliding away at 5:50.

From this point until the end of the piece, I just saw the journey of these metal objects across deep space and time and their interaction with the nothingness around them.

The piece is a distinct experience to be involved in.

When I listened to this piece again, after the Wednesday discussion in class,  I found that my perception of this piece has had changed greatly.
If I had to listen only to the beginning of this song,  I would reckon that it does not give you an indication of what you are going to experience through out the piece.   The start of Atmospheres is quite simple,
As the melody gets more complicated,  images start appearing.  I had not noticed the similarities with nature that we discussed in class, although I had experienced the “good vs. evil” feeling many of the class shared.  As I heard it again I noticed a  part, starting at minute 5:11, where there is a particular chaos.  As I heard, I couldn’t help noticing that this particular period of time did not resemble nature, but the opposite, it sounded to me like the chaos of  civilization, with its noise and traffic.  This part seems antagonistic to the nature, which indeed can be related with many of the parts of the piece.   All the straight points in the song have an element of chaos, but in this part, this element is particularly strong.

The first substantial chunk of time in the piece runs from the beginning up until about 1:04; it consists of high pitch strings and some ambient chrome-sounding horns. Then, until 1:21, more mid-level strings fade in and out, and organs start coming in with stringent chords. The first full-orchestral crescendo at around 1:25-1:54 encompasses what I feel to be the true beginning of the piece, with a second similar, but different, very harmonious crescendo following thereafter (this is where I saw meadows and monastaries, and felt a majestic presence). The piece then cools down, like the eye of a storm, with string ‘debris’ floating around a space hollowed out by what sounds like a droning organ until around 2:53. Woodwinds lead the next slow charge, wherein high pitch flutes and reeds fill the void as they bounce off of each other. This caucophony ends abruptly with the introduction of loud bass strings at 3:43. It feels like a house fell. Something fell. The stark realizations soon following this catastrophy can be felt as the creeping high strings come back in again, wimpering in a downward spiral until 4:25, when more various-pitch strings join into a whirling crescendo that is silenced immediately at 4:43. Afterwards, the isolated multi-pitch moans of horns and winds strike sparingly until 5:12, when the trombones wail and wail, with other horns joining in, one bass horn idling in and out in an oscillating manner, until the slow end of the crescendo at 5:48, where high-pitch strings and winds enter the stage again, meandering through my aural cavities, harmless but potentially lethal it seems. The piece is almost completely silent at 6:25-6:35, which is ended by a few violins and the ‘wave’ sounds at 6:45. This is followed by the whistling, fluttering sounds of flutes and clarinets and violins from then to 7:00. At this point, the room for aloofness is taken away by the attention-demanding sounds of various quiet winds until 7:50. From then on until 8:08, A very low bass note (I assume a tuba) underscores the slowly crescendoing unidentifiable (by me) “mechanical” sounds that take the last scene from 7:50 on until the end of the piece. The imagery is undeniable. Gloomy, macabre, yet striking.

The “cool spots” I would have identified would probably be the strikingly beautiful aforementioned crescendo at 1:55, and the “waves” moment at 6:45. I know we discussed the latter in class, but I’ll stand by my opinion that the glory I felt at 1:55’s crescendo truly weighted the piece in its background of what a classical sense of beauty can be, tossed into an array of what I’ll admit were at first very awkward-sounding nonharmonious chords in this piece. It grounded me and my sense of self in such a way that the rest of the piece has so much more of an effect on me. It’s brilliant. I love it.

After reading up on some Ligeti biography from the ever-trusty Wikipedia, I found myself visualizing a background story to Atmospheres as I listened. I envisioned a time-traveling journey spanning the history and demise of some dystopic and ravaged land, with the listener alternately speeding past faint, quickly occurring events or seemingly entering and becoming part of the events (or the aftereffects of the events) him/herself. The traveler begins at the present time, where anxiety reigns and the fate of the entire country is balanced precariously on the edge. Tensions rise and fall in waves throughout the first two minutes, where life is marked both by uneasiness and sporadic hope, eventually cresting with some glorious event heralded by the brass (from 1:50 to 2:05) as a sign of optimism for a better future. But afterwards (2:07), confusion and disorder seep in; society begins to decay, industries crumble. A new powerful party forces its way towards the ruling position, and the tension and chaos begin rising again. The listener is brought up, up, through the turbulent “atmosphere” of the nation’s fast-paced history (the screeching flutes at 3:15), so close to the sunlight of a new and better time to come…and suddenly the new authority brings down the hammer with a totalitarian, resilient, unforgiving power (3:44). The listener falls back through the grey despair below, passing hints and memories of the past when art and music were gifts to be treasured and used (4:02), not qualities to be censored and exterminated (4:38). An era of machinery arrives, with a complete absence of romanticism or creativity, marked by the grating, blaring horns of cars and trains and sirens (5:14).

Fast forward to the far future: only faint, distorted memories of music remain (5:54), and the nation has deteriorated into a barren wasteland haunted by stragglers and wandering creatures (6:38 onwards).

I realize that this interpretation is pretty wacked out and a bit far-fetched, but like I said–especially after studying a bit of Ligeti’s history, it was only too easy to correlate Atmospheres with some of the experiences he went through and the creative stifling he suffered as a composer in Hungary. It was much easier to visualize the piece rather than analyze it with words.

As for a “cool spot,” the one moment that always leaves goosebumps down my spine is 1:48-2:03, where the brass come in with a huge swelling chord that sweeps over you like the sun breaking through dark thunderclouds and spreading its light across a giant plain. In my opinion, it’s a section that seems different from the rest of the piece, and could almost be described as more traditionally “musical” then many of the other elements. It also has this sense of utter desperation/pride and sort of a last-man-standing feeling that lends it an extra dimension of power, besides its sheer dynamic range and volume.

After hearing Atmospheres in a real audio system, as opposed to my headphones, on Wednesday, I was determined to go all out this time through the piece.  I may have overdone it, because the first three times I tried to listen to Atmospheres, sitting blindfolded in front of my speakers in my darkened dorm room, I completely lost myself in the first wave of sound and had to start over.  When I finally managed to stay focused, I heard details I had never before noticed.  Strings whimpered just below the drone of the other instruments until nearly everything had faded away, then found voices of their own, singing louder and louder, combining with the rest of the orchestra into a blast of sound both louder and more unified than the first.  As if that texture were unsustainable, everything then seemed to fail, which brings me to cool part episode one.
Beginning at about 2:20, the strings start whimpering again, just like in the beginning as if they were afraid of something.  Then other instruments (though I can’t tell which) come in.  I can only describe the sound they make as if it were some foreign, otherworldly speech or chant.  I feel like it’s warning me about something, and everything changes after it speaks.  All of the initial unity and beauty disappears, and everything seems to be wrong.  At 6:39 the voices come back, though not as foreboding this time around, though, this time, that breathy sound never entirely disappears—it just seems to be ignored by other sounds.  It is the voice-like sound which ends the piece too.  The last few minutes, to me, feel as if the other instruments tried to stop the voice, as though it were some kind of judgment, but one by one they died away, until only the chanting voice remained, and then it died too.

I found this piece really intriging,  I liked how the tension was build up into several climax and anticlimax periods.  I found it quite nerve racking at times and I think it created a really good anthmosphere of suspense.

I guess I tend to find everything disturbing, but I felt as is this piece was telling me a story, the ending of it, being a such an anticlimax made fe feel that this particular story did not end well.