| Ligeti: Mechanical Music | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 9 reviews)
Sales Rank: 57011
Category: Music
Artists: Gyorgy Ligeti, Pierre Charial, Juergen Hocker, Francoise Terrioux
Publisher: Sony
Studio: Sony
Manufacturer: Sony
Label: Sony
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: 62310
UPC: 074646231029
EAN: 0074646231029
ASIN: B0000029P2
Release Date: May 20, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Tracks:
| • | No 1, Sostenuto-Misurato-Prestissimo, arr for barrel organ | | • | No 2, Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale, arr for barrel organ | | • | No 3, Allegro con spirito, arr for barrel organ | | • | No 4, Tempo de Valse, arr for barrel organ | | • | No 5, Rubato. Lamentoso, arr for barrel organ | | • | No 6, Allegro molto capriccioso, arr for barrel organ | | • | No 7, Contabile, molto legato, arr for barrel organ | | • | No 8, Vivace, Energico, arr for barrel organ | | • | No 9, Bela Bartok in memoriam, arr for barrel organ | | • | No 10, Vivace, Capriccioso, arr for barrel organ | | • | No 11, Omaggio a Girolamo Frescobaldi, arr for barrel organ | | • | No 10, Der Zauberlehrling, adapted for player piano | | • | No 9, Vertige, adapted for player piano | | • | No 11, En suspens, adapted for player piano | | • | No 13, L'escalier du diable, adapted for player piano | | • | No 7, Galamb borong, adapted for 2 player pianos |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com essential recording
Although Gyorgy Ligeti is best known for his eerie, tonally ambiguous choral and orchestral writing (immortalized in 2001: A Space Odyssey), this collection of works for musical automata--player piano, barrel organ, and metronomes--includes some of his most astonishing music. The player piano pieces are an exhilarating, intensely physical roller-coaster ride through superhuman tempi and dynamic extremes--an intriguing marriage of artifice and human invention. While clearly indebted to the influence of Nancarrow, Ligeti's player piano works are more approachable than Nancarrow's rigorous etudes, revealing the sense of humor that distinguishes Ligeti from his more ponderous contemporaries. Likewise, the controversial prank piece Metronomes foreshadows the phasing experiments of Reich with its intricate cross-rhythms created by metronomes marking time simultaneously at different speeds. Perhaps most fascinating of all are Ligeti's compositions for computer-modified barrel organ--a hand-cranked, calliope-like instrument popular with itinerant musicians in the 1700s. --Dennis Rea
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Report from the far reaches of the musical envelope. August 28, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This recording of Gyorgy Ligeti's 'Mechanical Music' gets five stars from me only because I happen to like this sort of thing, and 'good' music of this type which pushes the envelope in one direction or another is hard to come by. My immediate reaction to it is the amount of similarity I hear in some of the works to those of Frank Zappa's more serious instrumentals, especially to his 'signature' tune, 'Peaches En Regalia'. If I didn't know Sir Frank was heavily influenced by Edgar Varese, I would have started looking for Hungarian skeletens in the Zappa closet.
I will say that if you are not a nut on having the 'complete' set of things, this CD is less interesting than Ligeti's vocal works, but just a bit more interesting than his conventional instrumental works.
Not great music, but fun February 15, 2006
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Of Marcel Duchamp's powerful "Nude Descending a Staircase," an unfriendly (but perceptive) critic said a better title would have been "Explosion in a Shingle Factory." I'd suggest that Ligeti's Poeme Symphonique for 200 Metronomes might more descriptively be titled "Tone Poem: Waiting Out a Twenty-Minute Hailstorm in a Tin Shack."
That said, the album is fun. Some of the barrel organ works have a whimsicality that's appropriate for this instrument (which sometimes produces a sound that I can only describe as watery). It's interesting to hear Ligeti's already-strange Musica Ricercata pieces scored for barrel organ. No one of these pieces, however, carries a lot of emotional power.
share Ligeti's fascination with mechanical things. January 30, 2004
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
First off, I should inform you that Sony's Ligeti Edition series is being deleted so if you're interested in this stuff, you should pick up the ones you want as soon as you can. Ligeti Edition 5 is a good one. No, it's AWESOME. If you have any interest in "mechanical music," this should be essential.Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes was the main thing I wanted to hear on this collection. The piece starts with 100 metronomes ticking in a dense, ordered mass of monotone ticks. As the piece progresses, as some of the metronomes finish winding down, distinct rhythmic arrangements begin to emerge, swaying and wavy and disorienting. (You can also play a good trick on someone: play this piece in their car and they'll think the vehicle is about to explode or something.) Finally, one metronome is left ticking alone, then silence. The concept seemed utterly fascinating so I knew it was something I had to check out. Fortunately, it is more than just an idea that sounds good on paper - it is a very enthralling piece of music. In the liner notes, Ligeti discusses the thermodynamic category of maximal entropy, which factored into his considerations in composing this piece. That's interesting, because in his work on "dissipative structures," Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine theorized that a given system might reach a "bifurcation point," at which its simpler processes can no longer provide for order. At this point, Prigogine tells us, the system can either go into a total, entropic collapse, or evolve into a higher form of order. The second law of thermodynamics (on which our understanding of entropy is based) may not be as relevant as Prigogine's insights. Rather than coming to maximal entropy upon the finale of the single metronome, we can think of it as a new beginning. It's kind of inspirational in its own weird little way. To get the most out of it, play it on your finest stereo equipment at massive volumes and drown in the sound (gotta emulate the live performance anyway you can). Another highlight of this collection as Ligeti's piano Etudes adapted for player piano. In standard form, the Etudes demand reams of virtuosity. Here, they are rearranged for player piano where there are no limits imposed by the performer - even the godlike Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Fredrik Ullen are still MEN, and thus have man's limitations. Needless to say, these adaptations are stunning and astonishingly fast, from the head-spinning runs of L'escalier du diable to the astonishing gamelan texture of Galamb borong (for two player pianos). Also of interest is Continuum, adapted for two player pianos. It takes the blurry prestissimo to unreal speeds (it cannot actually be played fast enough on standard piano - the original was written for harpsichord). The barrel organ pieces are very amusing adaptations of early Ligeti with shadows of Bartok, and they are full of the original pieces' rhythmic ingenuity and vigor, but with flawless mechanical precision and tone control. I think a big reason for my enjoying them is their quirky sound. As for Musica ricercata, personally I'd rather listen to Aimard's piano version (on Ligeti Edition 3), but the barrel organ adaptation is a pretty interesting spin on the piece, with an arrangement that gives it a very different flavor. The barrel organ also makes them sound kinda proggy, hehe. Get it. Remember, this stuff's going out of print, and Ligeti is so good you don't want to miss your opportunity to have his music!
 Better than it had any right to be November 26, 2003
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I stalled for a long time on buying this disc because the general premise didn't seem attractive. 40 minutes of arrangements for barrel organ (mainly of early Ligeti), 15 of arrangements for player piano and a 20-minute piece for 100 metronomes just didn't seem much like fun. In part I was right, but there are also some surprising successes in store for the listener.Continuum and Hungarian Rock are both harpsichord pieces: one a frenetic pattern-illusion toccata, the other a piece of faux-naif postmodern pastiche. Both come off very well in barrel organ transcription--it's so much easier to hear details that tend to get lost in live performance. Three early piano pieces follow in barrel organ transcriptions: the Capriccio #1 and Invention are not greatly interesting, but Pierre Charial's barrel organ version of the second Capriccio finds depths--and premonitions of later Ligeti--in it that have so far been missed by live interpreters. The Poeme Symphonique might well be Ligeti's most controversial piece, and it's a comparatively rare venture into Dadaism. Essentially, all the performance involves is queuing up 100 metronomes at different speeds and waiting for them to run down. It's actually more musically interesting than one would expect--patterns emerge from a blur before the rhythms become more and more regular at the end--but it's unlikely to be a piece the listener is likely to return to. (In truth, it works much better live, treated as an installation.) The barrel organ transcription of Musica ricercata for piano doesn't add very much to the original. One or two pieces--particularly the seventh--do benefit from having new light drawn on them, but in general I'd rather hear a pianist play it (particularly Aimard in his excellent performances on volume 3 of this edition). The disc ends with player piano transcriptions. Der Zauberlehring, Vertige, En suspens and L'escalier du diable all appear much faster here than on recordings with human pianists. L'escalier, in particular, gives a tremendous sheer visceral thrill, though I miss the expressiveness of a live pianist. Coloana fara sfarasit is actually intended for a player piano, as Ligeti found it was too hard for a real pianist to play. It's a splendidly exhilarating ride, and I hope one day a super-virtuoso will be found who can play it on the piano. The two transcriptions for two antiphonally divided player pianos are not so interesting: Galamb borong gains little from the arrangement, while the version of Continuum that closes the disc isn't nearly as fun as the one that opens it. I enjoyed this disc, though it's not one I return to very often. If you like the concept, I would recommend this recording--though buy it sooner rather than later as Sony's website no longer lists this disc as in print.
listen to with open ears June 4, 2003
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This cd is very interesting to listen to. Wow the barrel organ is a little different but it adds another view to Ligeti's music. Now for Poeme Symphonique for 100 metronomes, i didn't know how i would go with this piece. First time was like wow different but the second time started to hear something very personal.Music is what you make it
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