Poème symphonique pour 100 métronomes

Even though the metronome is a device that every musician owns for practising an instrument, it is not, strictly speaking, a musical instrument. So when, in 1963, the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti created his Poème symphonique pour 100 métronomes in Hilversum (the Netherlands), under his own direction, he provoked a genuine scandal.
Very close to George Maciunas and Nam June Paik, Ligeti was then moving in the wake of the Fluxus movement, whose influence can be felt throughout this musical piece, which belongs as much to experimental music as to visual art installation.
The metronome, which ordinarily symbolises extreme musical rigour, is transformed here into a rhythmic chaos that the setting of the hundred metronomes at different speeds only reinforces. A work whose unfolding nevertheless allows a return to the metronome’s primary function when, at the end of the piece  – which lasts about twenty minutes  – only a single metronome remains in action.

“The hundred metronomes, left to tick until exhaustion, unwinding their mechanisms simultaneously but at different speeds, produce a sound cloud whose “great rhythmic diminuendo” stands out as the “first example of minimal music” (Ligeti) […] ”.

As in Ligeti’s instrumental pieces, this work constitutes an experiment on sound material, in this case rhythmic, exploiting the idea of the slow modification of a soundscape.

In the score, Ligeti indicates that performing the piece requires ten performers under the direction of a conductor, to wind the springs of the metronomes up as far as possible and to set the speeds as indicated in the score. At the conductor’s signal, the hundred metronomes are started simultaneously. Only then is the audience invited to enter the concert hall and take their seats while the metronomes stop one after another.

In 1995, the sculptor Gilles Lacombe, greatly impressed by listening to this work, devised a device that took him six months to design and that considerably simplifies its performance thanks to a mechanism that starts the hundred metronomes simultaneously . It is with this device that this version of the Poème symphonique pour cent métronomes is presented here, broadcast in Arte’s television creative programme, Die Nacht, produced by Paul Ouazan.

Poème symphonique pour cent métronomes (1962)
Premiere: 13 September 1963, in Hilversum (the Netherlands), under the direction of the composer.

Publisher: Schott