Fifth Inversion Concert - The Ligeti Reimagined Project

The Ligeti Reimagined Project

György Ligeti’s famous 1953 wind quintet, Six Bagatelles is an arrangement that he made for winds from his solo piano work, Musica Ricercata that he composed in 1951. Ligeti only arranged six out of the eleven original movements from his piano piece for wind quintet. Musica Ricercata is a fascinating work that represents one of the first times Ligeti steps away from writing in a traditional style. Ligeti confined himself to only certain pitch classes in each movement, with each subsequent movement having exactly one more pitch class than the last. Movement I focuses on pitch class (A) only adding a (D) for the last note of the piece and by the eleventh movement he uses 12 pitch classes.

In 2019, Fifth Inversion commissioned New York composer, Adam Billings to arrange the other 5 original movements of Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata for wind quintet. The project was forced to pause during the pandemic, but was recently premiered at the 2022 International Double Reed Society Convention in Boulder, Colorado.