György Sándor Ligeti (born May 28, 1923) is a Hungarian composer (now living in, and a citizen of, Austria), widely seen as one of the great composers of instrumental music of the 20th century. Many of his works are well known in classical music circles, but among the general public, he is probably best known for the various pieces which feature prominently in the Stanley Kubrick films 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut. May 28 is the 148th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (149th in leap years). ... 1923 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... A composer is a person who writes music. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the... Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director. ... Film refers to the celluloid media on which movies are printed Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as the field in general. ... A movie poster from the original release of 2001 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is an immensely popular and influential science fiction film and book; the film directed by Stanley Kubrick and the book written by Arthur C. Clarke. ... Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is a film by Stanley Kubrick based on the novella Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler. ...

Biography

Ligeti was born in Dicsöszentmárton (now Târnăveni) and received his initial musical training in the conservatory at Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca), both in Transylvania, Romania. His education was interrupted in 1943 when, as a Jew, he was forced to labor by the Nazi Party. At the same time his parents, brother, and other relatives were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, his mother being the only survivor. Map of Romania showing Cluj_Napoca Cluj_Napoca (Hungarian: Kolozsvár, German: Klausenburg, Latin: Claudiopolis), the seat of Cluj county, is one of the most important academic, cultural and industrial centers in Romania. ... Transylvania (Romanian: Transilvania or Ardeal, Hungarian: Erdély, German: Siebenbürgen, Serbian: Transilvanija, Turkish: Erdel, Slovak: Sedmohradsko or Transylvánia, Polish: Siedmiogród) is a historic region that forms the western and the central parts of Romania. ... The Nazi swastika symbol The National Socialist German Workers Party ( German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), better known as the NSDAP or the Nazi Party was a political party that was led to power in Germany by Adolf Hitler in 1933. ... Auschwitz is the name loosely used to identify three main Nazi German concentration camps and 45-50 sub-camps. ...

Following the war, Ligeti returned to his studies in Budapest, graduating in 1949. He studied under Pál Kadosa, Ferenc Farkas, Zoltán Kodály and Sándor Veress. He went on to do ethnomusicological work on Romanian folk music, but after a year returned to his old school in Budapest, this time as a teacher of harmony, counterpoint and musical analysis. However, communications between Hungary and the west had been cut off by the then communist government, and Ligeti had to secretly listen to radio broadcasts to keep abreast of musical developments. In December of 1956, two months after the Hungarian uprising was put down by the Soviet Army, he fled to Vienna and eventually took Austrian citizenship. Budapest (pronounced or ), the capital city of Hungary and the countrys principal political, industrial, commercial and transportation centre, has more than 1. ... Pál Kadosa (1903–1983) was a leading Hungarian composer of the post Bartók generation. ... Zoltan Kodaly Zoltán Kodály (December 16, 1882 – March 6, 1967) was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, educator, linguist and philosopher. ... Sándor Veress (1907–1992) was a Hungarian composer. ... Ethnomusicology (from the Greek ethnos = nation and mousike = music), formerly comparative musicology, is the study of music in its cultural context, cultural musicology. ... Folk music, in the original sense of the term, is music by and of the people. ... Harmony is the use and study of pitch simultaneity and chords, actual or implied, in music. ... Counterpoint is a very general feature of music (especially prominent in much Western music) whereby two or more melodic strands occur simultaneously - in separate voices, either literally or metaphorically (if the music is instrumental). ... Musical analysis can be defined as a process attempting to answer the question how does this music work?. The method employed to answer this question, and indeed exactly what is meant by the question, differs from analyst to analyst. ... This article is about communism as a form of society built around a gift economy, as an ideology that advocates that form of society, and as a popular movement. ... 1956 was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Vienna (German: Wien [viːn]) is the capital of Austria, and also one of Austrias nine federal states (Bundesland Wien). ...

There, he was able to meet several key avant-garde figures from whom he had been cut off from in Hungary. These included the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig, both then working on groundbreaking electronic music. Ligeti worked in the same Cologne studio as them, and he was inspired by the sounds he was able to create there. However, he produced little electronic music of his own, instead concentrating on instrumental works which often contain electronic-sounding textures. A work similar to Marcel Duchamps Fountain Avant garde (written avant-garde) is a French phrase, one of many French phrases used by English speakers. ... Karlheinz Stockhausen (born August 22, 1928) is a contemporary composer. ... Electronic music is a loose term for music created using electronic equipment. ... Cologne skyline at night. ...

From this time, Ligeti's work became better known and respected, and his best known work might be said to span the period from Apparitions (1958-9) to Lontano (1967), although his later opera, Le Grand Macabre (1978) is also fairly well known. In more recent years, his three books of piano Études have become quite well known thanks to recordings made by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Federik Ullén, and others. The foyer of Charles Garniers Opéra, Paris, opened 1875 Opera is an art form consisting of a dramatic stage performance set to music. ... Le Grand Macabre (première 1978) is György Ligetis only opera to date. ... This article is about the modern musical instrument. ... An etude (from the French word étude meaning study) is a short musical composition designed to provide practice in a particular technical skill in the performance of a solo instrument. ... Pierre-Laurent Aimard (born 9 September 1957) is a French pianist. ...

Ligeti took a teaching post in Hamburg in 1973, resigning in 1989. Since the 1980s, he has suffered from ill health, which has slowed his compositional output, though he continues to write. Position of Hamburg in Germany Hamburgs central broadway Jungfernstieg at the Alster lake, between 1900 and 1914 This article is about the city in Germany. ... Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 1960s and 1970s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ...

Ligeti has expressed fondness for the fractal geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot, and the writings of Lewis Caroll and Douglas R. Hofstadter. A fractal is a geometric object which can be divided into parts, each of which is similar to the original object. ... Beno t Mandelbrot was the first to use a computer to plot the Mandelbrot set. ... Photograph of Lewis Carroll taken by himself, with assistance Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832 – January 14, 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a British author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman and photographer. ... Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American academic. ...

Ligeti's music

Ligeti's earliest works are an extension of the musical language of his countryman Béla Bartók. The piano pieces, Musica Ricercata (1951-53), for example, are often compared to Bartók's set of piano works, Microkosmos. Ligeti's set comprises eleven pieces in all. The first uses almost exclusively just one pitch class, A, heard in multiple octaves. Only at the very end of the piece is a second note, D, heard. The second piece then adds a third note to these two, the third piece adds a fourth note, and so on, so that in the eleventh piece, all twelve notes of the chromatic scale are present. Béla Viktor János Bartók (March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945) was a composer, pianist and collector of East European folk music. ... This article is about the modern musical instrument. ... In music, an octave (sometimes abbreviated 8ve or 8va) is the interval between one musical note and another with half or double the frequency. ... The chromatic scale is any musical scale that contains more than one consecutive half-step (in other words two adjacent pairs of scale degrees or members which are separated by a semitone). ...

Already at this early stage in his career, Ligeti was affected by the communist regime in Hungary at that time. The tenth piece of Musica Ricercata was banned by the authorities on account of it being "decadent". It seems that it was thus branded owing to its liberal use of minor second intervals. Given the far more radical direction that Ligeti was looking to take his music in, it is hardly surprising that he felt the need to leave Hungary. This article is about communism as a form of society built around a gift economy, as an ideology that advocates that form of society, and as a popular movement. ... In music theory, an interval is the distance in pitch between two notes, the lower and higher members of the interval. ...

Upon arriving in Cologne, he began to write electronic music alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen. He produced only three works in this medium, however, including Glissandi (1957) and Artikulation (1958), before returning to instrumental work. His music appears to have been subsequently influenced by his electronic experiments, and many of the sounds he created resembled electronic textures. Apparitions (1958-59) was the first work which brought him to critical attention, but it is his next work, Atmosphères, which is better known today. It was used, along with excerpts from Lux Aeterna and Aventures, in the soundtrack to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey; in fact, the music was used without Ligeti's permission. Cologne skyline at night. ... Karlheinz Stockhausen (born August 22, 1928) is a contemporary composer. ... Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director. ... A movie poster from the original release of 2001 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is an immensely popular and influential science fiction film and book; the film directed by Stanley Kubrick and the book written by Arthur C. Clarke. ...

Atmosphères (1961) is written for large orchestra. It is seen as a key piece in Ligeti's output, laying out many of the concerns he would explore through the 1960s. It virtually completely abandons melody, harmony and rhythm, instead concentrating purely on the timbre of the sound produced, a technique known as sound mass. It opens with what must be one of the largest cluster chords ever written - every note in the chromatic scale over a range of five octaves is played at once. The piece seems to grow out of this initial massive, but very quiet, chord, with the textures always changing. Orchestra at City Hall (Edmonton). ... 1960 was a leap year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... }} Wiktionary has a definition of: Melody In music, a melody is a series of linear events or a succession, not a simultaneity as in a chord. ... Harmony is the use and study of pitch simultaneity and chords, actual or implied, in music. ... Rhythm (Greek ρυθμός = tempo) is the variation of the duration of sounds or other events over time. ... In music, timbre is determined by its specturm, which is a specific mix of keynote,overtones, noise, tune behaviour, envelope ( ... ) as well as the temporal change of the spectrum and the amplitude. ... In contrast to more traditional musical textures, sound mass composition minimizes the importance of individual pitches in preference for texture, timbre, and dynamics as primary shapers of gesture and impact. ... A tone cluster, in music and in Western tuning, is a chord or simultaneity comprised of consecutive tones separated chromatically. ... The chromatic scale is any musical scale that contains more than one consecutive half-step (in other words two adjacent pairs of scale degrees or members which are separated by a semitone). ... In music and music theory, a chord (from the middle English cord, short for accord) is three or more different notes or pitches sounding simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously, over a period of time. ...

Ligeti coined the term "micropolyphony" for the compositional technique used in Atmosphères, Apparitions and his other works of the time. He explained micropolyphony as follows: "The complex polyphony of the individual parts is embodied in a harmonic-musical flow, in which the harmonies do not change suddenly, but merge into one another; one clearly discernible interval combination is gradually blurred, and from this cloudiness it is possible to discern a new interval combination taking shape." Micropolyphony is a type of 20th century musical texture involving the use of sustained dissonant chords that shift slowly over time. ...

From the 1970s, Ligeti returned to some extent to a more melodic style, and also began to concentrate on rhythm. Pieces such as Continuum (1970), Clocks and Clouds (1972-3), were written before he heard the music of Steve Reich and Terry Riley in 1972, yet the second of his Three Pieces for Two Pianos, "Self-portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin in the background)," commemorates this affirmation and influence. He also became interested in the rhythmic aspects of African music, specifically that of the Pygmies. In the mid-'70s he wrote his first opera, Le Grande Macabre, a work of absurd theatre with many scatological references. His music of the 1980s and '90s has continued to emphasize complex mechanical rhythms, often in a less densely chromatic idiom (he tends to favor displaced major and minor triads and polymodal structures). Particularly significant are the Études pour le piano (Book I, 1985; Book II, 1993; Book III in progress), which draw from such diverse sources as gamelan, African polyrhythms, Bartók, Conlon Nancarrow, and Bill Evans. Other notable works in this vein include the Horn Trio (1982), the Piano Concerto (1985-88), the Violin Concero (1992), and the a cappella Nonsense Madrigals (1993). This article provides extensive lists of events and significant personalities of the 1970s. ... Steve Reich (born October 3, 1936) is an American composer. ... Terry Riley (born 24 June 1935 in Colfax, California) is an American minimalist composer. ... Africa is a large and diverse continent, consisting of dozens of countries, hundreds of languages and thousands of races, tribes and ethnic groups. ... Generally speaking, pygmy (from Greek pygmaios, fist sized, a kind of dwarf in Greek mythology) can refer to any human or animal of unusually small size, for example, the pygmy hippopotamus. ... In music, chromatic indicates the inclusion of notes not in the prevailing scale and is also used for those notes themselves (Shir-Cliff et al 1965, p. ... Insignia of an 0-4 in the U.S. Armed Forces In the US Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and the British Army, a major is a commissioned officer superior to a captain and inferior to a lieutenant colonel. ... Generally speaking, a minor chord is any chord which has a minor third above its root, as opposed to a major chord which has a major third. ... In music, a mode is an ordered series of musical intervals, which, along with the key or tonic define the pitches. ... A gamelan is a musical ensemble of Indonesian origin typically featuring metallophones, xylophone(s), drums, and gongs. ... Polyrhythm is the simultaneous sounding of two or more independent rhythms. ... Conlon Nancarrow (October 27, 1912 - August 10, 1997) was an American composer who took Mexican citizenship in 1955. ... Portrait in Jazz Bill Evans (August 16, 1929–September 15, 1980) was one of the most famous jazz pianists of the 20th century, and the force behind the biggest shift in the jazz paradigm since Art Tatum. ...

Ligeti's most recent work is the Hamburg Concerto for horn and chamber orchestra (1998-99, revised 2003).

List of selected works

• Andante and Allegro for string quartet (1950)
• Balad? ?i joc for two violins (1950)
• Concert românesc for Orchestra (1951)
• Musica ricercata for piano (1951-1953)
• String Quartet No.1, "Métamorphoses nocturnes" (1953-54)
• Glissandi, electronic music (1957)
• Artikulation, electronic music (1958)
• Apparitions for Orchestra (1958-59)
• Atmosphères for Orchestra (1961)
• Volumina for organ (1961-62, revised 1966)
• Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes (1962)
• Requiem for Soprano and Mezzo Soprano solo, mixed Chorus and Orchestra (1963-65)
• Cello Concerto (1966)
• Lux Aeterna for 16 solo voices (1966)
• Lontano for Orchestra (1967)
• Two Studies for organ (1967, 1969)
• Continuum for harpsichord (1968)
• Ramifications for 12 solo strings (1968-69)
• String Quartet No. 2 (1968)
• Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet (1968)
• Chamber Concerto for 13 instrumentalists (1969-70)
• Melodien for Orchestra (1971)
• Double Concerto for Flute, Oboe and Orchestra (1972)
• Clocks and Clouds for 12 female voices (1973)
• San Francisco Polyphony for Orchestra (1973-74)
• Études pour piano, Premier livre (1985)
• Piano Concerto (1985-88)
• Violin Concerto (1992)
• Études pour piano, Deuxième livre (1988-94)
• Hamburg Concerto for solo Horn and Chamber Orchestra with 4 obligato Natural Horns (1998-99, revised 2003)
• Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel: Weöres Sándor verseire (2000)
• Études pour piano, Troisième livre (1995-2001)

The Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes by 20th century composer György Ligeti that is played by an orchestra of 100 metronomes. ... György Ligetis String Quartet No. ...

Awards

• Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition (Etudes for Piano) (1986)
• Schock Prize for Musical Arts (1995)
• Kyoto Award (2001)
• Polar Music Prize (2004)

The Grawemeyer Award for music composition is an annual prize intituted by H. Charles Grawemeyer, industrialist and entrepreneur, at the University of Louisville in 1984. ... The Schock Prizes were instituted by the will of philosopher and artist Rolf Schock (1933-1986). ... The Polar Music Prize is an international music prize and awarded to individuals, groups or institutions in recognition of exceptional achievements in the creation and advancement of music. The prize was founded in 1989 following a donation from Stig Anderson and is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of...

See also

• List of Austrians in music

This is a list of Austrian composers, singers and conductors A Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, composer and music theorist August Wilhelm Ambros, composer (19th century) Wolfgang Ambros, singer (Austropop) Christian Anders, singer Marianne von Auenbrugger, composer and pianist 1759-1782 B Paul Badura-Skoda, pianist (born 1927) Ludwig von Beethoven, composer...

External links

• SonyClassical.com: Gyorgy Ligeti (http://www.sonyclassical.com/artists/ligeti_top.htm)
• Braunarts.com: Ligeti (http://www.braunarts.com/ligeti/)
• EssentialsofMusic.com: Gyorgy Ligeti (http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/composer/ligeti.html)
• György Ligeti & Atmosphères at www.lichtensteiger.de (http://www.lichtensteiger.de/ligeti.html)
• György Ligeti's 'Aventures' (http://d-sites.net/english/ligeti.htm)
• CompositionToday - Ligeti article and review of works (http://www.compositiontoday.com/articles/ligeti.asp)