Extended Atmosphères

Extended Atmosphères is a recomposition of György Ligeti's ATMOSPHÈRES. György Ligeti wrote the piece in 1961 and in the same year it was premiered by the SWF Orchestra in Donaueschingen. ATMOSPHÈRES is a textural composition and a radical response to serialism. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick used a recording of the piece as a sample ‘atmosphere’ in shooting his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, commissioned it for the score, and over night ATMOSPHÈRES became famous as film music. In 2011, ten years after the virtual odyssey and fifty years after the film’s premiere, van der Heide and Sonntag entered into a sonic discourse with Ligeti’s futuristic audio icon and made a recomposition that questions how Atmosphères would have sounded if it would have been composed today.