"It is impossible to say just what I mean!/But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen..."—T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

In 1961, the young Hungarian composer György Ligeti did a pretty amazing thing: he wrote a piece called Atmospheres, in which almost nothing happens, extremely slowly. The European avant-garde was still obsessed with quantifying musical parameters, with crystallizing pitch, duration, timbre, and register into rigid regions, radiating with speed and hardness—and then Ligeti cast out this massive orchestral goo, the enemy of all geometries, devoid of contours and as slow and gaseous as a trip through Saturn. A paean to all mysterious and intangible, Atmospheres initialized both a brilliant swerve from the music of its time, and a kind of life-journey for Ligeti's own incipient voice: a musical vision on the verge of disintegration, inventively trying to put itself back together, to re-integrate.

Written barely more than a decade after Atmospheres, Ligeti's Double Concerto for Flute and Oboe of 1972 doesn't sound much like that earlier work; in the composer's own words, the "static, self-erasing web became more illuminated; divergent, heterogeneous and contrasting musical motion nestled its way into the complex of sound." But if one listens closely, the same path is being trodden. The ensemble is now smaller and foregrounds two soloists and its own fragile lines, and one vast slow movement has become two smaller movements, a slow and a fast one. But the same musical drama holds—the attempt to bring something to mind, to search, find, and articulate an elusive state.

Simplified, the Double Concerto's difference is one of relief—it's as if Ligeti shined a high-powered flashlight into the micropolyphonic fog of Atmospheres and revealed its hidden insides, "as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen." These nerves are mostly drawn out by the two soloists, a flautist (doubling alto and bass flute), and an oboist; but they often magnetize the ensemble into their unfoldings as well. The result is wildly different in each of the concerto's two movements: in the opening Calmo, con tenerezza, the two soloists collect the orchestra into a lithe but supple body of evolving harmonies, neither diatonic nor chromatic; expanding and contracting with increasing suspense, the movement reaches a blindingly bright climax but immediately collapses into inarticulate obscurity. The following Allegro corrente reveals a brilliant turn in Ligeti's music: it's as if the first movement was defibrillated into shocked motion, forcing the soloists and the other winds to sputter in wild fits and splintering lines. And yet, amidst this sudden berserk rush, nothing actually seems to go anywhere; a harmonic and gestural paradox emerges, the musical equivalent of an M.C. Escher staircase, moving up and down simultaneously, yet staying in place. Ligeti's own description offers a priceless vision of beauty, mortality, and comedy at once: "the music glitters as though deep frozen and moves as stiffly as a puppet."

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