Precursory Attempts

Ligeti mentions an interesting orchestral effect, one from the last periods of Romanticism in music: Feuerzauber at the end of the Walkyrie by Wagner.

He describes the dazzling effect as:

[...] the figures in the violin parts are so difficult to play in the requested tempo and exactly as they are written that, inevitably performers do make slight mistakes, most often slight rhythmical inaccuracies. That creates little temporal fluctuations (unsynchronizations) between performers. Those deviations are aperiodic and with an usual fourteen First and fourteen Second violin players each making different ``slight'' mistakes, a scintillating effect results.

[...]

This effect is not the sum of the notes played by each musician, it is rather a new quality of the global sound space.

[...]

I did understand that timbre quality only after having experimented on the sequences of ``over-fast'' notes of Koenig in the electronic music studio. If that happens as a by-product in the Feuerzauber, then I wanted to compose music where such effect would be used intently.

My aim was not to get random variations in the performance of the music but to willingly create transformations of textures in a network of high density polyphony.