György Ligeti - Clocks and Clouds (1973)

György Ligeti (1923-2006) Clocks and Clouds, for 12 female voices and orchestra (1973) Performers: - Asko|Schönberg, Ensemble - Capella Amsterdam, Choir - Reinbert de Leeuw, Conductor Notes (from Steve Lacoste, ): “The title of Ligeti’s Clocks and Clouds refers to an essay by the Anglo-Austrian philosopher Karl Raimund Popper, “On Clocks and Clouds.” Popper’s essay describes two different kinds of processes that occur in nature, one that can be measured exactly (“clocks”) and the other, made up of indefinite occurrences that can only be described in a statistical approximation (“clouds”). According to Ligeti: “I liked Popper’s title and it awakened in me musical associations of a kind of form in which rhythmically and harmonically precise shapes gradually change into diffuse sound textures and vice-versa, whereby then, the musical happening consists primarily of processes of the dissolution of the ‘clocks’ to ‘clouds’ and the condensation and m