Why Ligetilines?

Music and dance unfold in time

while visual art offers a consistency

that allows it to mediate between them. While the Ligeti Solo Cello Sonata

served as the creative locus of this project, creating a graphic interpretation

of the music enabled responses that are both reflective of and independent from

the original music. For its bottom line, Ligetilines uses a graphic score,

which creates and communicates

as product and process blur.

Overview

When I was first learning the Ligeti Solo Cello Sonata, coincidence presented

the choreography of George Balanchine, performed by a male/female duet.

It was the dynamic between these dancers that evoked Ligeti's tale.

She his secret love, a cellist who inspired the first 'Dialogo' movement of

the Solo Sonata, rejected this amorous token (a story likely borrowed from that

of the 1st Bartók Violin Concerto).

But within the dance it was the continuity

of line, the articulation of gesture

that inspired me: at that moment

as a musician, I desired the expressive power of bodies in motion

through dance.

 

Forward to the not-so-distant past:

I combined watercolour, pastel, wax, and ink in images that I believe represented my impression of the Ligeti Solo

Cello Sonata. Where I saw imitation, composer Dan Ehrlich found inspiration, and he used some of

the graphic score pages as compositional sketches for his new solo cello piece, Lines for Gage.

 

Come full circle: after weeks of planning with choreographer Harriet Macauley, and more weeks of rehearsal with Harriet and dancers PJ Hurst and

Joel O'Donoghue, the choreographed Ligeti Solo Cello Sonata and

new Lines for Gage met on one program. Here and now, on this site, you should explore. Beyond the product, explore

the process that is Ligetilines.