I composed the orchestral piece Melodien in 1971. I tried to loosen up the dense micropolyphony of my musical language, to make it more transparent. Basically, I stayed true to my earlier style: the musical form unfolds like a stretched fabric in the continuously flowing time, but the individual voices no longer merge (as in my earlier music), rather they can be heard individually in their overlapping and interweaving . The voices become individual melodies, with their own style, their own tempo, rhythm and interval structure. If you listen to the work for the first time, it appears as a chaos of discrepant melodies - but if you know the music better, the internal connections become tangible, the hidden harmonic skeleton of the form becomes tangible. (Gyorgy Ligeti)

This facsimile edition offers an impressive access to the composer's work. A study score in modern notation is also available.