8.4.5 Etude 15: White on White

The contours of Arc-en-ciel are those of a rainbow, or arch: the music goes up (bar 7) and down again, then up again (bar 16) and down again, and stops in the middle of the third arch.

8.4.5 ETUDE 15: WHITE ON WHITE This etude was inspired by the 1918 Kazemir Malevich painting of the same title.

The task that Ligeti imposed on himself was almost impossible: to write a piece for only the white keys of the piano. The problems are twofold.

Firstly, the music may quickly degrade into a moving white-key cluster; whatever the composer writes, this sound field will dominate everything.

Ligeti circumvents this problem in the second part of the piece by using the same rhythmic drive of Etude 1: a continuous eighth movement which is subdivided into irregular groups and marked by an accent. The rhythmic subdivision is different for the RH and the LH, resulting in a counterpoint of accents.

The second problem is that of the scale. As in the first etude, the eighth movements are based on the principle that the hand remains in one position, which allows for very fast tempi and Ligeti asks just that: Vivacissimo con brio. But the scale may lead to a major or minor cluster (c-d-e-f-g or a-b-c-d-e), a recognisable sound object that soon starts to sound kitschy. Ligeti avoids this effect by starting from interval rows that are based on second-third-second-third, or second-second-thirdsecond-third. However, now the music may start to sound pentatonic, which consists of second-third-second-second-third. Ligeti avoids this as well, by regularly placing a fourth, augmented fourth, or fifth in the second-third row, but in such a way that the position of the hand changes as little possible to enable the superfast tempo. However, when a change of position is necessary, he indicates this in the score. The interval structure of the second part appears to be the only possibility of performing this music in such a high tempo without lapsing into moving white-key clusters or pentatonic rows.

In the first part, tempo has all but removed from the music: the music consists of the slowly played canon between RH and LH in half note values. The RH material consists of a row of 40 intervals and isolated tones, forming rows of seconds. This approach is strongly related to his chromatic Lamento lines, except that the chromatics are replaced by diatonic rows that do not have this Lamento nature:

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This row of 40 tones is repeated with a few minor variants. In order to hide this repetition, the first two notes are intervalically one second lower. The row is then repeated once more and this last repetition is again the same as the first row of 40.

This somewhat rigid use of the canon structure is abandoned in the fast second part. The LH runs melodically quasi-parallel with the RH by consistently forming seconds with it. This changes in the 8th eighth note of bar 36, where the dynamic suddenly changes from ff to pp. From this pp moment on, we see that irregular fifth/fourth intervals are being interwoven in the parallel second movement. In bar 39 the bass introduces an interval played in a slow tempo; the interval is an inversion of a second: the none. From that moment on the eighth notes are given accidentals in 11 places, breaking with the all-white key aesthetic. Actually, with the pp part a form of entropy enters the machinery of the piece. To even enhance this entropy, the etude ends with an unexpected sound: a stacking of fifths (g-d-a-e-b-f -c -g ) in which the tones e and b have been left out.