A Jewish, Hungarian family in Nazi Hungary, Ligeti’s family was imprisoned in a labor camp in 1942. Only he survived. After the war he was able to resume studies in Budapest, at the Liszt Academy, again with Farkas, and with the well-known Hungarian composer Sándor Veress. He began teaching at the Liszt Academy in 1950, but he balanced his academic career with research and field study in Romanian folk music: this activity owes at least as much to Ligeti’s own artistic intuition as to the Stalinist cultural repression that effectively prohibited composers from departing from folksong. The key figures in contemporary European music—Schoenberg, Webern, even Bartók—were censored, and Ligeti’s performed music at the time was explicitly influenced by Romanian and Hungarian folksong arrangements.

Wider doors were briefly opened at the 1956 revolution, but only briefly, only suggesting the tantalizing possibility of an entire career in Eastern Europe. The Russian invasion put a final end to his difficult life in Hungary; he fled to Vienna, and was immediately embraced by important figures in the avant-garde, including Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig, and Herbert Eimert, who invited him to join the West German Radio electronic music studio in Cologne. Although he never embraced electronic music as Stockhausen, Nono, and Boulez did, the three years he spent working in the studio were decisive influences on his music, and in electronic works such as Artikulation one can hear the static blocks of sound that had been a preoccupation—if a latent one—in his music since the 1940s, and that define his first mature achievements. The orchestral work Apparitions was premiered in Cologne in 1960 and established his international reputation.

During the sixties, an extremely productive period, revelation succeeded revelation: Atmosphčres was his first major statement, and was perhaps the first major alternative to European serialism: static masses of orchestral sound that give the simultaneous sense of immobility and motion, constructed as they are from a very dense counterpoint—‘micropolyphony,’ as the composer suggests—that in turn leads the music back to history. Adventures (1962) and Nouvelles aventures (1965) played upon theatre of the absurd, incorporating nonsense syllables in ecstatic games of meaning, linguistics, fabrication, and fantasy. The Requiem (1965) and Lux aeterna (1966) begin to use these techniques in an even more explicit historical contextualization that at once celebrates and provokes that history. These two works made particularly powerful impressions: the former was awarded the 1967 Beethoven Prize in Bonn; the latter was chosen by Kubrick for the climactic ‘Beyond the Infinite’ sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The soundtrack to this film, which set two other Ligeti works next to works by Johann and Richard Strauss, was a bestseller; thus Ligeti became the first among the avant-garde European composers to penetrate a mass audience.

The seventies saw a rediscovery of melody—heralded, perhaps, by the title of his 1971 work Melodien—although Ligeti’s melodies are often atonal but diatonic, and they are exposed to idiosyncracies of the overtone series, which produce deviations from the conventional tempered scale. A concurrent preoccupation was a strong influence of Duchampian dadaism. His 0’00”, a satire of John Cage, has been described as the briefest composition ever written, and Cage is said to have been deeply offended; The Future of Music (1961) is scored for a mute speaker in front of an audience. But the most celebrated piece in this vein, the Počme symphonique of 1962, for 100 metronomes, is both a provocation and a peculiarly plastic expression of machinery gone awry, an idea incorporated ‘compositionally’ in several works to memorable effect, the most famous example being the Meccanico movement of the Chamber Concerto, written some nine years later.

His opera Le Grand macabre, based on a work by the Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode, was premiered in Stockholm in 1978, and is in many ways a summation of his diverse practices. The subject of the libretto is nothing less than the apocalypse, a subject treated in a bewildering array of techniques both dramatic and musical, ranging from reverent to bawdy, from hilarious to dark.

Ligeti took a hiatus from composition in 1979. At first glance, there is something of the astonishing departure in his return to composition, but in retrospect his works of the 1980s and beyond seem inevitable, both in the context of Ligeti’s own compositional career and of general musical trends. The polyrhythms of the ongoing books of Piano Etudes and of the Horn Trio and Piano Concerto reveal the strong impression made on the composer by recent musical discoveries, including those of the American expatriate Conlon Nancarrow; the New York minimalists, particularly Reich; and West African music. But as the music reaches into the future, it typically reaches backwards as well, towards a rediscovery of Hungarian and Romanian folksong that was his original inspiration.

Ligeti gained Austrian citizenship in 1967, and since 1973 has taught at the Hamburg Music Academy; among other awards, he received the 1986 Grawemeyer Prize.

Click here to see a page of one of Ligeti's scores.

Joshua Cody