All Clouds are Clocks: György Ligeti

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It’s unlikely that anyone will be stuck for anything to watch during the next few days but you could do worse than spend an hour with this documentary about the music of composer György Ligeti. I’ve mentioned this several times over the years, it’s one of my favourite films by the late Leslie Megahey, my favourite director of TV arts documentaries. All Clouds are Clocks was made for the BBC’s long-running Omnibus arts strand, and is unique among all the films made for that series in being broadcast twice (in 1976 and 1991), with the second broadcast appending new footage to the original film.

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The film as a whole is fairly simple by today’s standards, an interview with the composer in his studio intercut with extracts from Ligeti recordings and performances. After years of documentaries filled with hyperactive editing and inane comments from celebrity interviewees Megahey’s straightforward approach is a considerable relief. You have the music, and you have the composer talking about the music; that’s it. Especially commendable is that there’s no mention at all of the use of Ligeti’s recordings as film scores. If the BBC made a film like this today (which they wouldn’t in any case) the first thing you’d see would be clips from Stanley Kubrick films.

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As is often the case in Megahey’s documentaries, the director himself is the narrator, and in this one he’s also the off-screen interviewer as he was in his celebrated Orson Welles documentary. The illustrative episodes include melting plastic clocks, the slow awakening of a wooden puppet, and a performance of Poème symphonique, the composition which requires the priming and operation of 100 metronomes. Ligeti comes across as good-humoured and approachable, a serious artist but one whose general demeanour never seems loftily superior to ordinary human concerns the way Stockhausen often did. Ligeti’s manner confirms the sense of humour behind compositions like the one for the metronomes, and even more so in the choral/orchestral work Nouvelles Aventures. The latter is shown in an extract from a filmed performance at the Roundhouse, London, in 1971, a concert conducted by Pierre Boulez which provokes raucous laughter from the audience when a tray loaded with crockery is hurled into a bin. There’s humour of a blacker variety in the 1991 section which includes a description of Ligeti’s “anti-anti-opera”, Le Grande Macabre, based on a play by Michel de Ghelderode. This was Ligeti’s only operatic work, and I think it may be the only Ligeti composition I still haven’t heard in full. Most stagings are a riot of grotesque costuming and set design (the setting is a place called “Breughelland”) so it obviously needs to be seen as well as heard.

Previously on { feuilleton }
György Ligeti, a film by Michel Follin
Leslie Megahey, 1944–2022
Le Grand Macabre
Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard
Metronomes

György Ligeti, a film by Michel Follin

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2023 is the centenary of György Ligeti’s birth so here’s an hour-long French documentary about the composer directed by Michel Follin. György Ligeti was made in 1993, two years after Leslie Megahey’s BBC crew had paid a return visit to Ligeti’s apartment to film an update to the Omnibus profile from 1976, All Clouds Are Clocks. The two documentaries complement each other rather well, although you’ll have to take my word for this since Megahey’s film has yet to appear on any video site. Both films interview Ligeti at the studio table where he wrote many of his compositions, and where he talks about his musical interests and intentions.

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The two films differ in their approach to the world outside Ligeti’s window. Megahey concentrated on the music, illustrating a number of lengthy recording extracts with footage of melting clocks, a wooden puppet, etc, whereas Follin attends to the biography, with Ligeti relating his personal history while also describing the evolution of his musical ideas. Ligeti’s youth was a tumultuous one, encompassing the upheavals of the Second World War, during which he lost half his family to the Holocaust, and the later Communist years in Hungary when the kinds of modern music that he was trying to write were proscribed by the State. It’s good to see him confirm the importance of Bartók’s music to his growth as a composer. Ligeti’s oeuvre contains many Bartók-like moments but I’ve often thought that regarding these as any kind of influence or reference might be a lazy comparison based on a shared nationality.

All of this reminds me that I recently picked up a copy of the 5-disc Ligeti Project in a charity shop but still haven’t listened to it all the way through. Charity shops can be useful (and cheap!) sources of modern composition if you don’t mind trawling week after week through iterations of the classics. Secondhand shops were my first introduction to music like this, providing the opportunity to sample the recordings of those mysterious names at a bargain price. Bargains are still to be found if you’re patient, as with the Ligeti box. Other recent discoveries include Without Sinking by Hildur Gudnadóttir, and Memoryhouse, the first album by Max Richter, both of which were bought for a fraction of their usual asking price.

(A note about the film subtitles. These are an amateur translation which fails to recognise the names of Gyula Krúdy—the writer whose work Ligeti describes finding at an early age—and Paul Hindemith, the German composer.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
Le Grand Macabre
A playlist for Halloween: Orchestral and electro-acoustic
Metronomes

Leslie Megahey, 1944–2022

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TV producer & film director Leslie Megahey died at the end of August but the news has taken a while to filter through to these pages where his BBC TV productions have been the subject of several posts. My recurrent comments about his work were effusive enough for him to send me a handwritten note of thanks a few years ago, plus a promotional card for one of the films in the Artists and Models series. If more of his productions had been available online or on disc I would have written something about them as well, but old television, especially the documentary variety, remains persistently inaccessible to future audiences.

There are biographical details in the link above so what follows is a list of the Megahey productions that, for this viewer at least, made his name one to look out for in the TV listings. Some of these are on YouTube, a couple are available on disc, while the rest have yet to resurface anywhere. Everything here is highly recommended…if you can find it.

Omnibus: All Clouds are Clocks (1976/1991): An hour-long interview with composer György Ligeti. I caught this one on its updated rebroadcast in 1991 when Megahey revisited Ligeti to see what directions his career had taken over the past 15 years. Currently unavailable.

Schalcken the Painter (1979): Another Omnibus film, and a ghost story (after Sheridan Le Fanu) that’s as good as any of the BBC’s MR James adaptations. Released on (Region B) blu-ray & (Region 2) DVD by the BFI.

Arena: The Orson Welles Story (1982): A two-part interview (165 minutes in total) which caught Welles in a rare mood when he was happy to talk at length about his career. The TV equivalent of the huge book of Peter Bogdanovich conversations. Part One | Part Two

Artists and Models (1986): Three drama/documentaries about French painters: David, Ingres and Géricault.

Cariani and the Courtesans (1987): Another historical drama about an artist, Giovanni Cariani (c. 1490–1547). Very much in the mould of Schalcken the Painter but without the supernatural element. Currently unavailable.

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1988): The best film version of Bartók’s opera. The Region 1 DVD by Kultur seems to be deleted but is worth seeking out for having removable subtitles. There’s a copy at YouTube.

The Complete Citizen Kane (1991): A 90-minute documentary about Welles’ film using extracts from the Arena interviews and the Megahey produced TV series The RKO Story, plus new material. No longer on YouTube (or anywhere else) due to a copyright complaint. This is why I’m always saying you should download these things as soon as you find them.

The Hour of the Pig (1993): A feature film about a medieval animal trial, this one was hacked around by Miramax then released in the US as The Advocate where it flopped. The hard-to-find UK version turned up on YouTube a few days ago.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Men and Wild Horses: Théodore Géricault
The Complete Citizen Kane
Schalcken the Painter revisited
Le Grande Macabre
Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard

Weekend links 582

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Illustration by Gustave Doré from L’Espagne (1874) by Jean Charles Davillier.

• Warp Records has announced the forthcoming publication of Atmospherics by Jon Hassell, a short book collecting the diary extracts, composition notes and other ephemera that Jon compiled as an evolving appendix for his website. I was involved with the first iteration of the Atmospherics when we were working on his site in 2004, and for me this section was always the most interesting part of the project, comprising unique, personal material. The book will be published in October.

• “Almost everything in his book would be dismissed by today’s streaming behemoths as ‘too quirky, too local, too slow, too dry, too difficult, too weird’.” Sukhdev Sandhu reviewing The Magic Box, a history of British TV from the 1950s to the 1980s by Rob Young.

• New music: Cobalt Desert Oasis by Marco Shuttle, Angel’s Flight (AD 93) by Biosphere, and The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse by Stephen Prince, a sequel to an earlier release by A Year In The Country which includes an accompanying novella.

• Mix of the week, month and year: Sentimental Ornament: A Broadcast Rarities Mix by Aquarium Drunkard. First posted almost a year ago, I only discovered it last week; Aquarium Drunkard is now added to my RSS feed to avoid further neglect.

• I didn’t post anything for Bloomsday this year but if I’d seen these caricatures by Craig Morriss back in June I would have linked to them at the time.

• At Unquiet Things: The Eerie Moods and Pulpy Frights of Henri Lievens.

• Whole lotta rarities: the strangest Led Zeppelin artwork.

• Old music: A Willow Swept By Train by Janet Beat.

Instant Lettering Database

Atmospheres (1967) by Wimple Winch | Atmospheric Lightness (2018) by Brian Eno | Ligeti: Atmosphères (2019) by Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France; Alan Gilbert

Weekend links 511

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Design by Romek Marber, 1963.

• The death of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki prompted so many “Shining composer” headlines you have to wonder what kind of notices he might have received if his early work hadn’t been purloined by Hollywood. György Ligeti always seemed ambivalent about having his music used as cinematic illustration (Kubrick annoyed him by altering some of it without permission) but Penderecki worked as a composer for Polish films in the 1960s, not only providing a score for The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) but also (surprisingly) writing music for a number of short animations. I’ve been listening to his music for almost 40 years, after a chance discovery of the stunning Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima led me to seek out more. I have to admit that the appeal of his recordings lay in their ability to thrill and terrify—qualities that musicologists seldom address—and I’ve never paid any attention to Penderecki’s later work which was less of an assault on the senses. At The Quietus James Martin argues for listening to the entire oeuvre, not just the early works. For more about the composer’s life and work, Culture.pl has a number of good articles, eg: Mazes, Notes & Dali: The Extraordinary Life of Krzysztof Penderecki, and Music Is Not for Everyone: An Interview with Krzysztof Penderecki.

• The late Romek Marber (1925–2020) was a designer/illustrator whose name is familiar to collectors of Penguin books via the Marber Grid, the template he created in the early 1960s for the Penguin Crime series, and which was later extended across the entire paperback range. Marber talked about this period of his work in Penguin by Illustrators in 2009. Elsewhere: Rick Poyner on Marber’s design, and a suggestion for how the Marber Grid was designed.

• “…you’ll see Lego and children’s toys, but also Rawlplugs, tile spacers, Monopoly houses, cigarillo tips, curtain hooks, biofilters, Smarties tube lids, fishing beads, broken security seals, razor parts, bits of toothbrushes, roofing screw caps, medical lancets, golf tees, false teeth, plastic soldiers, posties’ rubber bands, bungs and stoppers.” Beachcomber Tracey Williams talks to Andrew Male about the undying ubiquity of plastic waste.

• “Thanks to Bookshop, there is no reason to buy books on Amazon anymore,” says Alex Lauer. The caveat is that the service is limited to the USA. I order books direct from publishers or from eBay and Abe; the latter may be Amazon-owned but you’re still paying most of the money to the individual sellers.

• Mixes of the week: Radio Belbury 19: Family Fun Time, and Through A Landscape Of Mirrors Vol. VII – France IV by David Colohan.

• “[Amanda Sewell’s] Wendy Carlos: A Biography is a great work of scholarship,” says Geeta Dayal.

• “Part of me expects to go on forever.” David Barnett on Michael Moorcock at 80.

• “What is the point of a critic if not to tell the truth?” asks Rachel Cooke.

John Boardley on medieval road-trips and the invention of print.

Anna Bogutskaya on where to begin with the Weird West.

• Inside Tove Jansson’s private universe by Sheila Heti.

• Memory Of Hiroshima (1973) by Stomu Yamash’ta’s Red Buddha Theatre | Hiroshima Mon Amour (1977) by Ultravox! | Hiroshima (1982) by Borsig