Lines, Masses, Micropolyphony: Ligeti's Kyrie and the "Crisis of the Figure"

LINES, MASSES, MICROPOLYPHONY: LIGETI’S KYRIE AND THE “CRISIS OF THE FIGURE” ERIC DROTT N AN ESSAY published in 1965, the critic Heinz-Klaus Metzger bluntly asserted that “good melodies can no longer be written.”1 That Metzger would arrive at such a stark, pessimistic appraisal of the melodic figure’s status in contemporary music is surprising, and somewhat ironic. He had long been a staunch advocate of the postwar musical avant-garde, acting as something of an in-house intellectual for the Darmstadt circle in the 1950s. Yet his comments, a decade removed from the heroic years of the Darmstadt school, recalled nothing so much as the sort of complaint that critics hostile to new music had often lodged against this repertoire: that having broken with certain conventions of Western art music, avant-garde composers had broken with immutable laws of aesthetic value; that these same composers had contented themselves in creating works that were I Ligeti's Kyrie and the “Crisis of the Figure” 5 a-melodic at best, and anti-melodic at worst; and that even if one were to admit that atonal music “can no doubt be sung, given time and patience,” the fact of the matter was that “the results will scarcely please.”2 But in contrast to such familiar critical tropes, Metzger’s claim that “good melodies” had grown scarce since the advent of atonality was not to be construed as a value judgment on new music. Rather it was the assertion of a historical fact, one whose social and historical implications needed to be confronted. The jagged lines that abound in the twelve-tone compositions of Schoenberg were not, in Metzger’s eyes, “a matter of ineptness, . . . a mistake on Schoenberg’s part” but represented the composer’s unflinching response to “an objective, historically reached, irreversible situation within the material dimension of music.”3 Metzger’s position here and elsewhere in the essay betrays a clear debt to the aesthetic theory of his former teacher, Theodor Adorno, especially in his contention that the renunciation of familiar tokens of beauty assumes a socio-political import. A simple moral calculus is at work in this argument, so that what appears to be an artistic defect is converted, by means of the critical function that it performs, into a social good. The renunciation of ‘singing’ melodies thus transforms into a quasi-ethical obligation, whereas the attempt to continue writing such figures would constitute an act of ideological deception, one that would mask the real ugliness of society as it exists behind a comforting illusion of aesthetic beauty. Metzger’s article betrays a debt to Adorno’s thought in a more concrete way as well. In recounting the historical bases for the ‘crisis of the figure,’ Metzger both draws from and expands upon the discussion of twelve-tone melody in Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. In tonal music, Metzger observes, the composition of melodic lines is constrained by the hierarchical nature of the tonal system as it is inscribed in the diatonic scale. This means that the ‘emancipation of dissonance’ liberates linear gestures at the same time as it releases dissonant sonorities from the obligation to resolve: “so with Schoenberg, with so-called free atonality, the figure became autonomous : in its melodic as well as in its harmonic aspect.”4 But the disavowal of tonality deprives figures of that which had furnished them with a sense of purpose and “substantiality.” The upshot of this, according to Metzger, is that the melodic freedom provided by atonality risks slipping into arbitrariness, into mere caprice: It is as though the emancipated musical figure, borne along by no pre-conceived system whatsoever, is no longer—in the Hegelian sense—‘substantial’: the isolated figures, freed from every heteronomy , constructed purely in themselves, are transformed. . . . [They 6 Perspectives of New Music become] ornamental in effect, and it does not seem that they should be of any greater value than trills, mordents and turns.5 The subsequent adoption of the twelve-tone technique by Schoenberg and his followers may be read as an attempt to create a durable system that would restore the sense of necessity that had been lost with the abandonment...