György Ligeti's Kammerkonzert: Analysis 

Thanks David -- I truly appreciate your kind words. I love how your channel is evolving. Good to hear from you.

miranda c Good to hear from you, and thanks! Next analysis video coming in a few days.

Thanks for your message and your kind comments! If you are interested in supporting my efforts, have a look at the rewards I offer on my Patreon page: www.patreon.com/samuelandreyev

Wonderful to be introduced to Amacher's work . Thankyou for mentioning her ! The Internet will bring ideas to every corner of the globe ! Liberality and forms of democracy are sure to follow !

Hi Ryan. The reason for the gap in videos is that I recently had a daughter and am very preoccupied with family life at the moment. However I will be posting new content soon. Keep checking and thanks for your patience.

I appreciate you responding, congratulations! I’ve come to be a bit obsessed w your analysis videos excited for your return. Thank you for your hard work, wish you all the best!

Thanks. It's a hard balance to get right. At first I was presenting these lectures as though I were teaching in a classroom (I taught analysis in a conservatoire in France prior to starting this channel). The internet has other properties of course.

Let us know what you think of the video. Glad you enjoyed the Ligeti piece.

You did a fantastic job! You managed to clearly put into words things about the piece that I couldn't have explained but that I certainly felt when listening to it, like how the range of notes expands at the start, how the timbre of the instruments is used and how that pitch sequence is slowly morphed and opened up. I also really appreciate you going into so much detail about how the canon works, even showing that there is a canon in it at all, as I've never before really understood how micro-polyphony is in anyway polyphonic! It was great to hear the Ligeti anecdote about the vague objects floating beneath a sheet of ice, as these elements were what most stood out to me about the piece, so it's gratifying to discover they were somewhat the point of the piece! Thank you for the video. I really hope this channel encourages more musical laymen such as myself to look into contemporary classical music, as I'm sure it will!

Thanks for your kind comments, I'm glad to hear that you found the analysis helpful. There is always more to hear in a Ligeti piece -- I've been listening to this work now for decades and keep returning to it! Best regards.

My pleasure. I'm glad to hear it was helpful.

I haven't seen any detailed analyses by Ligeti of this piece, although he commented in general terms about what he was trying to achieve with it. The fact that he used canons as a way of structuring his micropolyphonies has been commented upon by many analysts.

Good point. Some musical structures can't be identified as such during ordinary listening, but can nevertheless help to orient our perception, or to generate a surface. In otherwords, there isn't always a simple 1-to-1 relationship between the structure, and our perception. This is true of the standard classical repertoire, by the way. The listener who isn't well-versed in classical music may easily fail to recognize a fugue when they hear it; but the fugue is still operating, nonetheless.

Samuel Andreyev Samuel Andreyev I agree, but there still is a point to think about the link between capacity of perception and ability to appreciate the music. Like you said, certain structures cannot be heard as such - and maybe were never meant to be, I'd add. I would still argue that there is a kind of critical treshold of ability to perceive, which determines - for some degree at least - how capable a person is to appreciate a given composition. That has been my personal experience, how the ability to perceive roughly correlates with ability to appreciate. Now, that might be blatantly obvious, but the on the money question (quite literally) for composers is: What are the perception abilities of average human? Composer who plays around this could very well reach a bigger audience than one who doesn't. That doesn't necessarily mean to dumb down the music: If a composition includes many levels of complexity, it supposedly offers something to appreciate for listeners of many skill levels. I'd say there are certain examples on that in contemporary repertoire. That being said, I'd never say that to be conscious of endless list of musical devices is a requirement to enjoy music. For me music communicates mostly through emotions and intuitions, and awareness of technical aspects is only a mean to expand that sphere. That was a bit long wall of text, sorry about that. Nevertheless, I already watched several of your videos and have to say: Good work, sir! Cheers!

Thank you for your kind comments. There's lot to discuss in what you say here, but briefly, I think that in the best case, you would want a piece to be able to communicate on multiple different levels: the complete neophyte should be able to find something to enjoy in it, while still offering enough richness to engage the most demanding listener. However, in all fairness, this is not an easy thing to achieve. So pieces that are difficult for the average listener are not necessarily bad pieces; they are simply difficult. Conversely, pieces that are accessible to everyone are not necessarily good pieces. As far as the threshold level of ability to perceive goes: there are certain physical limitations that are well understood: for instance, people can distinguish between certain ratios of duration, but beyond a certain limit (for instance, a 20 second sound versus a 21-second sound), they are no longer able to make distinctions.

Samuel Andreyev Thanks for the reply! Can you recommend a book or an academic publication which discusses the physical limitations you mentioned? Steven Pinker has a brief chapter on that in How the Mind Works, but I'm not aware of any publication dedicated to the subject.

Hi Olli, I learned about perceptual threshholds for pitch and duration while I was a student at the Paris conservatoire. From what I (vaguely) recall, the course materials were derived from articles by either Karlheinz Stockhausen or Werner Meyer-Eppler. I'm sorry I can't be more specific but it was quite a long time ago.

I would also like an explanation to this.

Hello Nico, Thank you for your kind message. There are resources online where you can find contemporary music scores, or at least samples. Many publishers, like Peters Edition, provide free samples of several pages of scores that you can view on their website. Some composers, even major ones like Georges Aperghis, give their scores away for free in the form of downloadable pdfs from their websites. And some composers upload their scores to IMSLP.org, a vast trove of free pdfs of music. I hope this is helpful. Best regards.

Agreed! Or Cello Concerto No. 1.

I am sure I massacred the pronunciation! My apologies (and thanks for the kind words)

Yes, I'd love to do this but I'm not sure if my viewership is high enough yet. I'd be embarrassed if only two people and a penguin showed up ;)

Also. I would like to note how amazing your video presentation has become lately. It's nice to see RU-vid channels progress like this.

Thank you. I'm stumbling along, learning as I go.

Samuel Andreyev i'd be pleased to live-chat with a penguin...😂

I would be happy to, but that is one of the longest and most complex works by Boulez (ca. 45 minutes), and I don't think I could do it justice in a RU-vid video.

​@@samuel_andreyev Fair point. I just thought it would be really interesting to see. Thanks for the reply!

Thanks for the comment. I'm experimenting with some new ways of producing the videos, and it may take me a while to find the optimal mode of presentation.

no problem. content is excellent as always, & trusted you'd be happy to get the feedback ...

On the contrary, I really enjoyed this new style! It seems more polished than sitting at a desk in your room. I don't see the speed as a problem as we can always skip back the video if we miss something. I sometimes watch an Adam Neely video simply because they're fun to watch, it doesn't matter what he's talking about- I'd love it if your channel was similar in that respect. Keep it up man, love the videos

My heart sinks whenever I see people trying to homogenize the style of RU-vid presentation and to make everything look slick and flawless and perfect, replacing all element of human spontaneity with brash humour and D A N K memes and one liners. Too many content producers constantly drag the attention to themselves, trying to force a sense of identity that comes across as really phony. On the other hand, Samuel here has the advantage that he puts the focus squarely on the music he's analysing, without showing off how knowledgeable, hip and funny he is. When Samuel makes a video about a piece of music, it's *about the piece of music*, and that already puts him leaps and bounds ahead of almost every other channel in this new wave of music youtubers. I applaud him for keeping his videos fascinating while seeking for a style of presentation that suits him. Every analysis he does makes me want to drop everything I'm doing and listen to the piece in question immediately (which isn't always possible, unfortunately), and this video was no different.

I liked the new style, it flows a bit better, to me. It is a bit fast paced, but I'm used to almost always increase the speed of the videos I see, so to me it was not a problem at all.

I'll remember not to have a coffee just before filming next time.

I find it helpful to press pause every now and then. It would be difficult to digest otherwise.

this is by far one of my favorite channels on youtube!!! thank you for all of your work!!

Planning to!

My pleasure. New video coming in a few hours.

@@samuel_andreyev :)))))