Ligeti escaped Hungary and reinvented orchestral sound clouds
György Ligeti (1923–2006), born in Romania and later an Austrian citizen, ranks among the late twentieth century’s crucial avant-garde composers. Blocked by Communist Hungary’s stylistic limits, he reached the West in 1956, studied electronics in Cologne, then broke through with works like Atmosphères.
Ligeti was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in a Transylvanian town then called Dicsőszentmárton, now Târnăveni, and was a distant relative of the violinist Leopold Auer. He claimed he only discovered that other languages existed when he overheard Romanian-speaking policemen. He began formal music training at the Cluj conservatory in 1941, but in 1944 he was conscripted into a forced labour brigade; his 16-year-old brother Gábor was deported to Mauthausen-Gusen. After the war he graduated from Budapest's Franz Liszt Academy in 1949, having studied with teachers including Zoltán Kodály, and researched Transylvanian folk music.
Early pieces grew out of Bartók's language. Bolder works such as the piano cycle Musica ricercata and his first string quartet went into the bottom drawer because of censorship, and the last of his Six Bagatelles for wind quintet was cut from their 1956 premiere as too dangerous. In December 1956, two months after the Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising, he fled to Vienna with Vera Spitz, leaving most of his manuscripts behind; they remarried the next year.
Within weeks he was in Cologne working beside Karlheinz Stockhausen at West German Radio's electronic studio, where he finished only Glissandi and Artikulation before tiring of the factional fighting. Those experiments shaped his orchestral writing: he coined the term micropolyphony for textures, as in Apparitions and Atmosphères, where dense lines blur into a single shimmering mass. Volumina for organ swapped conventional notation for diagrams, and Poème symphonique calls for one hundred mechanical metronomes.
Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey drew on his music, though he never wrote a film score. He taught in Stockholm, was composer-in-residence at Stanford, and held a Hamburg professorship. Fascinated by Mandelbrot's fractals, Hofstadter, Borges and Kafka, he spent his last three years in a wheelchair before dying in Vienna at 83.
Source: György Ligeti
