Ligeti, György Sándor

Lig·e·ti (lĭgʹə-tē), György Sándor. Born 1923.

Hungarian-born Austrian composer whose experimental works include orchestral, chamber, and choral music.

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▪ 2007

      Austrian composer (b. May 28, 1923, Diciosanmartin [now Tirnaveni], Transylvania, Rom.—d. June 12, 2006, Vienna, Austria), created avant-garde music concerned principally with shifting masses of sound and tone colours. Specific musical intervals, rhythms, and harmonies were often not distinguishable but acted together in a multiplicity of sound events. Ligeti's works were introduced to a wider audience when director Stanley Kubrick used his music in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and other films. Ligeti, the great-nephew of violinist Leopold Auer, studied and taught music in Hungary until the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, when he fled to Austria. He subsequently met avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and became associated with centres of new music in Germany and in Stockholm and Vienna, where he composed electronic music as well as pieces for instrumentalists and vocalists. Most of Ligeti's works after the late 1950s involved radically new approaches to music composition. He created a sensation with Future of Music—A Collective Composition (1961), which consisted of the composer regarding the audience from the stage, and Poème symphonique (1962), written for 100 metronomes operated by 10 performers. In Aventures (1962) and Nouvelles aventures (1962–65), Ligeti attempted to obliterate the differences between vocal and instrumental sounds, and in Cello Concerto (1966), the usual concerto contrast between soloist and orchestra was minimized.

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