Listen to This by Alex Ross Page A

encountered the older repertory while studying at the Kolozsvar Conservatory, in the early 1940s. The Second World War interrupted his schooling: after serving in a forced-labor gang, he returned home to discover that many of his relatives, including his father and his brother, had died in the Nazi concentration camps. His first major postwar work, Musica ricercata for piano (1951—53), dabbled in various Renaissance and Baroque tricks; the final movement, a hushed fugue, draws on one of Frescobaldi’s chromatic melodies. After leaving Hungary, in 1956, Ligeti entered his avant-garde period, producing scores in which melody and harmony seem to vanish into an enveloping fog of cluster chords, although those masses of sound are in fact made up of thousands of swirling microscopic figures. In the 1980s, Ligeti resumed an eccentric kind of tonal writing, in an effort to engage more directly with classical tradition; perhaps he also wished to excavate his tortured memories of the European past. The finale of his Horn Trio is titled “Lamento”; at the outset, the violin softly wails in a broken chromatic descent. Although the motif recurs in chaconne style, this is a somewhat unhinged ceremony of mourning, its funereal tones giving way to outright delirium. In the climactic passage, the three instruments execute musical sobs in turn, as if mimicking village cries that Ligeti heard as a child.
    In the last phase of his career, Ligeti devised his own lament signature. Richard Steinitz, the composer’s biographer, defines it as a melody of three falling phrases, dropping sometimes by half-steps and sometimes by wider intervals, with the note of departure often inching upward in pitch
and the final phrase stretching out longer than the previous two. That heightening and elongating of the phrases is another memory of folk practice. The Ligeti lamento cascades through all registers of the piano etude “Automne à Varsovie”; it also figures in several recklessly intense passages of the Violin Concerto (whose fourth movement is a Passacaglia) and of the Piano Concerto. And in the Viola Sonata, chaconne and lament once again intersect. The final movement of the sonata is titled “Chaconne chromatique,” and the rhythm of the principal theme—short-long, short-long, short-short-short-short long—recalls the languid motion of Dido’s Lament. Then the motif begins to accelerate, becoming, in Steinitz’s words, “fast, exuberant, passionate.” As in Hungarian Rock, Ligeti’s rollicking chaconne for harpsichord, the specter of the old Spanish dance returns, writhing behind a modernist scrim.
    THE BLUES
    In 1903, the African-American bandleader W. C. Handy was killing time at a train depot in Tutwiler, Mississippi—a small town in the impoverished, mostly black Mississippi Delta region—when he came upon a raggedly dressed man singing and strumming what Handy later described as “the weirdest music I had ever heard.” The nameless musician, his face marked with “the sadness of the ages,” kept repeating the phrase “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog,” and he bent notes on his guitar by applying a knife to the strings. The refrain referred to the meeting point of two railway lines, but it conjured up some vaguer, supernatural scene. Handy tried to capture the phantom singer of Tutwiler in such numbers as “The Memphis Blues,” “The Yellow Dog Blues,” and “The St. Louis Blues.” The last, in 1914, set off an international craze for the music that came to be known as the blues.
    One feature common to many early blues, whether commercial or rural, is the old downward chromatic slide. It runs in an almost subliminal way through the opening sequence of “St. Louis Blues,” and makes an unmistakable appearance in Bessie Smith’s 1925 recording of the song, where the young Louis Armstrong traces rapierlike solos on his trumpet. In Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” it takes on burlesque exuberance, merging