Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes
Encyclopedia
The Hungarian
composer
György Ligeti
composed Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes in 1962, during his brief acquaintance with the Fluxus
movement.
The piece requires ten "performers", each responsible for ten of the hundred metronome
s. The metronomes are set up on the performance platform, and they are all then wound to their maximum extent and set to different speeds. Once they are all fully wound there is a silence of two to six minutes, at the discretion of the conductor, then at the conductors signal they are all started as simultaneously as possible. The performers then leave the stage. As the metronomes wind down one after another and stop, periodicity becomes noticeable in the sound, and individual metronomes can be more clearly made out. The piece typically ends with just one metronome ticking alone for a few beats, followed by silence, and then the performers return to the stage (Ligeti 1962).
The controversy over the first performance was sufficient to cause Dutch Television to cancel a planned broadcast, replacing it with a soccer match (Ligeti 1997, 10). Ligeti regarded this work as a critique of the contemporary musical situation,
The Poème symphonique was the last of Ligeti's event-scores, and marks the end of his brief relationship with Fluxus (Drott 2004, 222).
The piece has been recorded several times, but performed only occasionally due to the obvious difficulty of procuring such a large quantity of machines.
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
György Ligeti
György Ligeti
György Sándor Ligeti was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born in a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he briefly lived in Hungary before becoming an Austrian citizen.-Early life:...
composed Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes in 1962, during his brief acquaintance with the Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
movement.
The piece requires ten "performers", each responsible for ten of the hundred metronome
Metronome
A metronome is any device that produces regular, metrical ticks — settable in beats per minute. These ticks represent a fixed, regular aural pulse; some metronomes also include synchronized visual motion...
s. The metronomes are set up on the performance platform, and they are all then wound to their maximum extent and set to different speeds. Once they are all fully wound there is a silence of two to six minutes, at the discretion of the conductor, then at the conductors signal they are all started as simultaneously as possible. The performers then leave the stage. As the metronomes wind down one after another and stop, periodicity becomes noticeable in the sound, and individual metronomes can be more clearly made out. The piece typically ends with just one metronome ticking alone for a few beats, followed by silence, and then the performers return to the stage (Ligeti 1962).
The controversy over the first performance was sufficient to cause Dutch Television to cancel a planned broadcast, replacing it with a soccer match (Ligeti 1997, 10). Ligeti regarded this work as a critique of the contemporary musical situation,
but a special sort of critique, since the critique itself results from musical means. … The "verbal score" is only one aspect of this critique, and it is admittedly rather ironic. The other aspect is, however, the work itself. … What bothers me nowadays are above all ideologies (all ideologies, in that they are stubborn and intolerant towards others), and Poème Symphonique is directed above all against them. So I am in some measure proud that I could express criticism without any text, with music alone. It is no accident that Poème Symphonique was rejected as much by the petit-bourgeois (see the cancellation of the TV broadcast in Holland) as by the seeming radicals.... Radicalism and petit-bourgeois attitudes are not so far from one another; both wear the blinkers of the narrow-minded. (Ligeti, cited in Nordwall 1971, 7–8)
The Poème symphonique was the last of Ligeti's event-scores, and marks the end of his brief relationship with Fluxus (Drott 2004, 222).
The piece has been recorded several times, but performed only occasionally due to the obvious difficulty of procuring such a large quantity of machines.