Music in the Morning
September 10, 2026
Beethoven wrote of his Pastoral Symphony that it should be ‘more the expression of feeling than painting’; John Harbison wrote similarly of his ‘Six American Painters’, of an oblique relationship between image, feeling, and expression in sound:
I wanted to evoke the artists’ after-images, rather than any of the individual paintings. When you look at a picture, you take away with you a general impression, a mood or color, that dominates the details; in music, on the other hand, one is apt to remember the details, a tune or a harmony. I wanted these movements to be a perceivable whole, an act of seeing.
These short works form a roughly chronological set (by the way, the political life of the painter George Caleb Bingham, from pre-Civil War Missouri, is particularly interesting to investigate). To try to find a dense continuity amongst them would be just too much. They are internal views of internal views, brightly un-definitive impressions from visits to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2000.
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György Ligeti wrote his first string quartet in 1953, a few years before emigrating to Vienna from Communist Hungary. Since he wrote at this time in the style of Béla Bartók, whose quartets were banned at the time, he kept this quartet private and unpublished. Political pressures were extreme: only ten years before, much of his family had died in the Holocaust. There was little to be gained from taking careless chances.
Of this string quartet, György Ligeti writes the following:
The first word of the subtitle Metamorphoses nocturnes refers to the form. It is a kind of variation form, only there is no specific “theme” that is then varied. It is, rather, that one and the same musical concept appears in constantly new forms - that is why “metamorphoses” is more appropriate than “variations”. The quartet can be considered as having just one movement or also as a sequence of many short movements that melt into one another without pause or which abruptly cut one another off. The basic concept, which is always present in the intervals but which is in a state of constant transformation, consists of two major seconds that succeed each other transposed by a semitone. In this First String Quartet there are certainly some characteristics of my later music, but the writing is totally different, “old-fashioned”; there are still distinct melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic patterns and bar structure. It is not tonal music, but it is not radically atonal, either. The piece still belongs firmly to the Bartók tradition (remember my situation as a composer in Hungary at the beginning of the fifties), yet despite the Bartók-like tone (especially in the rhythm) and despite some touches of Stravinsky and Alban Berg, I trust that the First String Quartet is still personal work.
–Tim Summers
I wanted to evoke the artists’ after-images, rather than any of the individual paintings. When you look at a picture, you take away with you a general impression, a mood or color, that dominates the details; in music, on the other hand, one is apt to remember the details, a tune or a harmony. I wanted these movements to be a perceivable whole, an act of seeing.
These short works form a roughly chronological set (by the way, the political life of the painter George Caleb Bingham, from pre-Civil War Missouri, is particularly interesting to investigate). To try to find a dense continuity amongst them would be just too much. They are internal views of internal views, brightly un-definitive impressions from visits to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2000.
--
György Ligeti wrote his first string quartet in 1953, a few years before emigrating to Vienna from Communist Hungary. Since he wrote at this time in the style of Béla Bartók, whose quartets were banned at the time, he kept this quartet private and unpublished. Political pressures were extreme: only ten years before, much of his family had died in the Holocaust. There was little to be gained from taking careless chances.
Of this string quartet, György Ligeti writes the following:
The first word of the subtitle Metamorphoses nocturnes refers to the form. It is a kind of variation form, only there is no specific “theme” that is then varied. It is, rather, that one and the same musical concept appears in constantly new forms - that is why “metamorphoses” is more appropriate than “variations”. The quartet can be considered as having just one movement or also as a sequence of many short movements that melt into one another without pause or which abruptly cut one another off. The basic concept, which is always present in the intervals but which is in a state of constant transformation, consists of two major seconds that succeed each other transposed by a semitone. In this First String Quartet there are certainly some characteristics of my later music, but the writing is totally different, “old-fashioned”; there are still distinct melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic patterns and bar structure. It is not tonal music, but it is not radically atonal, either. The piece still belongs firmly to the Bartók tradition (remember my situation as a composer in Hungary at the beginning of the fifties), yet despite the Bartók-like tone (especially in the rhythm) and despite some touches of Stravinsky and Alban Berg, I trust that the First String Quartet is still personal work.
–Tim Summers