György Ligeti – whose birthday it is today – was a classical composer, born in Romania, who lived in Hungary as a young adult, before fleeing Stalinist oppression to Austria. As he said in an interview much later, he lived under both the Nazis and the Communists (“so many years of Hitler and Stalin”). Growing up, as he did, limited his ability to travel, isolated him musically as well, cut off from the outside world, dominated by the restrictions placed on all art under tyrannical regimes. As horrible as all this is, it gave him a different perspective, the perspective of an outsider, a refugee, which he was. (One could say he was an internal refugee as well, held in place by the ruling power. We are learning what it means to have a government who turns its Big Brother eye onto its own citizens.) Stanley Kubrick used his music in 2001, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut (one of the things pointed up again and again by the people interviewed for Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures was how much Kubrick changed the way music was used in film).
Ligeti’s work is well-known by his colleagues and classical contemporaries, but it was Kubrick who introduced his work to a wider audience. Ligeti died in 2006, but how fortunate that he was still alive to be interviewed for Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures because some of his comments are invaluable. One, in particular.
Ligeti sits on a couch, reminiscing about Kubrick. Ligeti is an old man, and he does not look well. His skin is chalky white, his lips are almost blue, and there are black circles around his eyes. His accent is thick, and he has a passionate emphatic way of speaking that makes you listen very closely. This is an artist.
He was interviewed about all of the pieces he composed that Kubrick used, but it was the brief comment he made about his “Musica Ricercata” – used so unforgettably throughour Eyes Wide Shut – that stays with me. The clanging piano notes of the song are used so artfully, so perfectly, in Eyes Wide Shut that when I first saw it I couldn’t quite locate what was so frightening: it all seemed frightening, but it was the music that tipped it over the edge.
“Musica Ricercata” is almost unbearable to listen to. It’s so tense you ache for something to relieve it, even if whatever it is is violent. The music is not a “call to violence”. Those sharply struck piano notes are violence itself. The notes happen one by one, there is no “arrangement” or blending of left-hand with right-hand – there is NO cooperation. There is also an echo: what happens at the top-end of the piano is echoed by the same notes at the bottom end. The top and bottom create a trap: you can’t escape ABOVE and you can’t escape below: the notes are locked gates.
Additionally, the notes are in a cluster, which is a contradiction, due to the echo effect. But within the “tune,” there is not a wide range. The notes stay in one section of the piano, going up one note, down two, up two, down one … The sound is strange and jagged, creating tension, but resolution never comes. The notes just keep clanging, one by one, a little bit up, a little bit down. The workings of the piece are mysterious but undeniable.
Watching Eyes Wide Shut, I wanted the music to stop. Sometimes it does, but it always returns. When I would hear that clanging piano note, the dread would rise again. Primal.
This is how Kubrick used music in film.
Here is one of the sequences in Eyes Wide Shut:
The comment from Ligeti I am leading up to stopped me in my tracks because it reveals something, almost in a throwaway line, the moment gone before you can fully grasp it …
Musica Ricertata (a much longer piece than the section used repetitively in Eyes Wide Shut) was written in the early 1950s.
Ligeti, sitting on the couch, an old ill man, says to the interviewer:
I was in Stalinist terroristic Hungary where this kind of music was not allowed. And I just wrote it for myself. Stanley Kubrick understood the dramatics of this moment and this is what he did in the film and for me, when I composed it in the year 1950, it was desperate. It was a knife in Stalin’s heart.
Listen to the piece again. Listen to it thinking of his words.
