Poème symphonique is a 1962 composition by György Ligeti for one hundred mechanical metronomes.
The piece typically ends with just one metronome ticking alone for a few beats, followed by silence, and then the performers return to the stage.
[1] The controversy over the first performance was sufficient to cause Dutch Television to cancel a planned broadcast recorded two days earlier at an official reception at Hilversum's City Hall on 13 September 1963.
It is no accident that Poème Symphonique was rejected as much by the petit-bourgeois (see the cancellation of the TV broadcast in the Netherlands) as by the seeming radicals. ...
[5]Poème symphonique was the last of Ligeti's event-scores, and marks the end of his brief relationship with Fluxus.