György Ligeti

György Ligeti (1923–2006) was one of the most original and influential composers of the twentieth century. Born into a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, he survived the Holocaust (which killed much of his family) and lived under Communist Hungary until he fled west after the failed 1956 uprising, settling eventually in Austria. Freed from isolation, he became a leading figure of the European avant-garde, but always an independent one, never bound to any school. He is famous for his technique of ‘micropolyphony’, dense, slowly shifting clouds of sound made from many tightly interwoven individual lines, heard in works like Atmosphères and Lux Aeterna, several of which reached a vast audience through Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. His restlessly inventive output ranges from the absurdist opera Le Grand Macabre (his ‘anti-anti-opera’) to the intricate, rhythmically dazzling late Piano Études. A composer of wit, imagination and profound seriousness, he transformed how we think about musical texture and time.