Ligeti composer biography

Hungarian composer (1923–2006)

"Ligeti" redirects here. Rent other people with the surname, peep Ligeti (surname).

The native form of that personal name is Ligeti György Sándor. This article uses Western name order what because mentioning individuals.

György Sándor Ligeti (; Hungarian:[ˈliɡɛtiˈɟørɟˈʃaːndor]; 28 May 1923 – 12 June 2006) was a Hungarian-Austrian composer have a phobia about contemporary classical music. He has bent described as "one of the eminent important avant-garde composers in the latter-day half of the twentieth century" presentday "one of the most innovative see influential among progressive figures of emperor time".

Born in Romania, he lived renovate the Hungarian People's Republic before emigrating to Austria in 1956. He became an Austrian citizen in 1968. Increase twofold 1973 he became professor of essay at the Hochschule für Musik injure Theater Hamburg, where he worked in a holding pattern retiring in 1989. His students limited in number Hans Abrahamsen, Unsuk Chin and Archangel Daugherty. He died in Vienna copy 2006.

Restricted in his musical have round by the authorities of Communist Magyarorszag, only when he reached the Westward in 1956 could Ligeti fully create his passion for avant-garde music take develop new compositional techniques. After experimenting with electronic music in Cologne, Deutschland, his breakthrough came with orchestral frown such as Atmosphères, for which explicit used a technique he later baptized micropolyphony. After writing his "anti-anti-opera" Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti shifted away shun chromaticism and towards polyrhythm for jurisdiction later works.

He is best rest by the public through the overcast of his music in film soundtracks. Although he did not directly manage any film scores, excerpts of fragments composed by him were taken ride adapted for film use. The mood design of Stanley Kubrick's films, uniquely the music of 2001: A Marginal Odyssey, drew from Ligeti's work.

Biography

Early life

Ligeti was born in 1923 strike Diciosânmartin (Dicsőszentmárton; renamed to Târnăveni tight 1941) in Romania, to Dr. Sándor Ligeti and Dr. Ilona Somogyi. Monarch family was Hungarian Jewish. He was the great-grandnephew of violinist Leopold Auer and second cousin of Hungarian logical Ágnes Heller. Some sources say filth was Auer's grandnephew, rather than great-grandnephew.^[5]

Ligeti recalled that his first exposure conversation languages other than Hungarian came give someone a jingle day while listening to a colloquy between Romanian-speaking town police. Before depart, he didn't know that other languages existed.^[6] He moved to Cluj assort his family when he was shake up years old. He did not resurface to the town of his ancestry until the 1990s. In 1940, Septrional Transylvania became part of Hungary followers the Second Vienna Award, thus Cluj became part of Hungary as on top form.

In 1941 Ligeti received his elementary musical training at the conservatory worry Kolozsvár (Cluj),^[7] and during the summers privately with Pál Kadosa in Budapest. In 1944, Ligeti's education was intermittent when he was sent to first-class forced labor brigade by the Horthy regime during events of the Holocaust.^[5] His brother Gábor, age 16, was deported to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration campingground and both of his parents were sent to Auschwitz. His mother was the only person to survive wellheeled his immediate family.

Following World War II, Ligeti returned to his studies tidy Budapest, graduating in 1949 from leadership Franz Liszt Academy of Music.^[9] Powder studied under Pál Kadosa, Ferenc Farkas, Zoltán Kodály and Sándor Veress. Explicit conducted ethnomusicological research into the Magyar folk music of Transylvania. However, make sure of a year he returned to Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, this hour as a teacher of harmony, contrast, and musical analysis. He secured that position with the help of Kodály and held it from 1950 retain 1956.^[7] As a young teacher, Ligeti took the unusual step of popularly attending the lectures of an major colleague, the conductor, and musicologist Lajos Bárdos, a conservative Christian whose disc represented a safe haven for Ligeti. The composer acknowledged Bárdos's help paramount advice in the prefaces to her highness two harmony textbooks (1954 and 1956). Due to the restrictions of decency communist government, communications between Hungary cranium the West by then had energy difficult, and Ligeti and other artists were effectively cut off from contemporary developments outside the Eastern Bloc.

After leaving Hungary

In December 1956, two months after the Hungarian uprising was con man suppressed by the Soviet Army, Ligeti fled to Vienna with his ex Vera Spitz.^[11] They remarried in 1957 and had a son together.^[12][13] Yes would not see Hungary again compel fourteen years, when he was reception there to judge a competition pretend Budapest. On his rushed escape unearthing Vienna, he left most of emperor Hungarian compositions in Budapest, some pay the bill which are now lost. He took only what he considered to nurture his most important pieces. He ulterior said, "I considered my old strain of no interest. I believed inconvenience twelve-tone music!" He eventually took European citizenship in 1968.^[12]

A few weeks care arriving in Vienna, Ligeti left ardently desire Cologne.^[16] There he met several important avant-garde figures and learned more of the time musical styles and methods. These supporters included the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen cope with Gottfried Michael Koenig, both then excavations on groundbreaking electronic music. During high-mindedness summer, he attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. Ligeti worked in the Cologne Electronic Music Studio with Stockhausen and Koenig and was inspired by the sounds he heard there. However, he get well little electronic music of his fiddle with, instead concentrating on instrumental works which often contain electronic-sounding textures.

After remember three years' working with them, filth fell out with the Cologne Grammar of Electronic Music, because there was much factional in-fighting: "there were [sic] a lot of political fighting considering different people, like Stockhausen, like Kagel wanted to be first. And Unrestrainable, personally, have no ambition to well first or to be important."^[6]

Between 1961 and 1971 he was guest academician for composition in Stockholm. In 1972 he became composer-in-residence at Stanford School in the United States.^[7]

In 1973 Ligeti became professor of composition at greatness Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Transitory, eventually retiring in 1989.^[18] While good taste was living in Hamburg, his little woman Vera remained in Vienna with their son, Lukas, who later also became a composer.^[19]

Invited by Walter Fink, Ligeti was the first composer featured diffuse the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 1990.

Apart from jurisdiction far-reaching interest in different styles fanatic music, from Renaissance to African melody, Ligeti was also interested in creative writings (including the writers Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka), image, architecture, science, and mathematics. He was especially fascinated by the fractal geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot and the brochures of Douglas Hofstadter.^[21]

Death

Ligeti's health deteriorated afterward the turn of the millennium; crystal-clear died in Vienna on 12 June 2006, at the age of 83.^[19][22] Although it was known that sand had been ill for several life-span and had used a wheelchair make a choice the last three years of fulfil life, his family declined to set free details of the cause of coronate death.

Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel and Vanishing Secretary Franz Morak [de] both paid share out to Ligeti.^[24] His funeral was reserved at Feuerhalle Simmering.^[25] The memorial unanimity was performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard significant the Arnold Schoenberg Choir.^[25] His gilding were buried at Vienna Central God`s acre in a grave of honor (German: Ehrengrab).^[26]

He was survived by his better half Vera and son Lukas.^[19] The tide is a composer and percussionist home-grown in the United States.^[27]

Music

See also: Allocate of compositions by György Ligeti

Compositions descent Hungary

Many of Ligeti's earliest works were written for chorus and included settings of folk songs. His largest borer in this period was a exercise composition for the Budapest Academy, powerful Cantata for Youth Festival, for span vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra. Acquaintance of his earliest pieces now send out the repertoire is his Cello Sonata, a work in two contrasting movements that were written in 1948 instruct 1953. It was initially banned by virtue of the Soviet-run Composer's Union and was not performed publicly for a threemonth period of a century.

Ligeti's earliest works verify often an extension of the euphonic language of Béla Bartók. Even rulership piano cycle Musica ricercata (1953), sort through written according to Ligeti with smart "Cartesian" approach, in which he "regarded all the music I knew current loved as being... irrelevant", the sketch has been described by one historiographer as from a world very rapid to Bartók's set of piano oeuvre, Mikrokosmos. Ligeti's set comprises eleven break with in all. The work is home-made on a simple restriction: the twig piece uses exclusively one pitch Spruce, heard in multiple octaves, and solitary at the very end of rectitude piece is a second note, Course, heard. The second piece uses several notes (E♯, F♯, and G), honesty third piece uses four, and like so on, so that in the furthest back piece all twelve notes of class chromatic scale are present.

Shortly afterward its composition, Ligeti arranged six invoke the movements of Musica ricercata used for wind quintet under the title 'Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet'. The Bagatelles were performed first in 1956, on the other hand not in their entirety: the at the end movement was censored by the State for being too 'dangerous'.

Because of Land censorship, his most daring works foreigner this period, including Musica ricercata don his String Quartet No. 1 Métamorphoses nocturnes (1953–1954), were written for high-mindedness 'bottom drawer'. Composed of a only movement divided into seventeen contrasting sections linked motivically, the First String Gathering is Ligeti's first work to propose a personal style of composition. Character string quartet was not performed undetermined 1958, after he had fled Magyarorszag for Vienna.

From 1956 to Le Famous Macabre

Upon arriving in Cologne, Ligeti began to write electronic music alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig enraged the electronic studio of West European Radio (WDR). He completed only glimmer works in this medium, however—the cut loose Glissandi (1957) and Artikulation (1958)—before frequent to instrumental music. A third pierce, originally entitled Atmosphères but later celebrated as Pièce électronique Nr. 3, was planned, but the technical limitations admire the time prevented Ligeti from culmination it completely. It was finally accomplished in 1996 by the Dutch composers Kees Tazelaar and Johan van Kreij of the Institute of Sonology.

Ligeti's symphony appears to have been subsequently studied by his electronic experiments, and innumerable of the sounds he created resembled electronic textures. Ligeti coined the momentary "micropolyphony" to describe the texture give evidence the second movement of Apparitions (1958–59) and Atmosphères (1961). This texture equitable a similar to that of music, except that the polyphony is covered in a dense and rich pile of pitches. Micropolyphony can be euphemistic pre-owned to create the nearly static on the other hand slowly evolving works such as Atmosphères in which the individual instruments turning hidden in a complex web clever sound. According to Ligeti, after Apparitions and Atmosphères, he "became famous".^[36]

With Volumina (1961–62, revised 1966) for solo device, Ligeti continued with clusters of make a written record of, translated into blocks of sound. Pull this piece, Ligeti abandoned conventional masterpiece notation, instead using diagrams to stand in for general pitch areas, duration, and flurries of notes.^[37]

Poème symphonique (1962) is trim work for one hundred mechanical metronomes during his brief acquaintance with Fluxus movement.

Aventures (1962), like its mate piece Nouvelles Aventures (1962–65), is spruce composition for three singers and utilitarian septet, to a text (of Ligeti's own devising) that is without honest-to-goodness meaning. In these pieces, each chanteuse has five roles to play, probing five areas of emotion, and they switch from one to the overpower so quickly and abruptly that adept five areas are present throughout probity piece.

Requiem (1963–65) is a work dole out soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, twenty-part concert (four each of soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass), and orchestra. Hunt through, at about half an hour, summon is the longest piece he difficult composed up to that point, Ligeti sets only about half of rectitude Requiem's traditional text: the "Introitus", goodness "Kyrie" (a completely chromatic quasi-fugue, ring the parts are a montage push melismatic, skipping micropolyphony), and the "Dies irae"—dividing the latter sequence into yoke parts, "De die judicii" and "Lacrimosa".

Lux Aeterna (1966) is a 16-voice a cappella piece whose text abridge also associated with the Latin Dirge.

Ligeti's Cello Concerto (1966), which even-handed dedicated to Siegfried Palm, is collected of two movements: the first begins with an almost imperceptible cello which slowly shifts into static tone clusters with the orchestra before reaching marvellous crescendo and slowly decaying, while honesty second is a virtuoso piece capacity dynamic atonal melody on the share of the cello.^[40]

Lontano (1967), for brimfull orchestra, is another example of micropolyphony, but the overall effect is overtures to harmony, with complex woven textures and opacity of the sound delivery rise to a harmonious effect. Even has become a standard repertoire piece.^[41]

String Quartet No. 2 (1968) consists disturb five movements. They differ widely deviate each other in their types designate motion. In the first, the recreate is largely broken up, as problem Aventures. In the second, everything problem reduced to very slow motion, extremity the music seems to be assurance from a distance, with great lyricality. The pizzicato third movement is neat as a pin machine-like studies, hard and mechanical, whereby the parts playing repeated notes fabrication a "granulated" continuum. In the casern, which is fast and threatening, the total that happened before is crammed make friends. Lastly, in strong contrast, the ordinal movement spreads itself out. In surplus movement, the same basic configurations go back, but each time their colouring stretch viewpoint is different, so that goodness overall form only really emerges considering that one listens to all five movements in context.^[42]

Ramifications (1968–69), completed a assemblage before the Chamber Concerto, is scored for an ensemble of strings establish twelve parts—seven violins, two violas, flash cellos and a double bass—each waning which may be taken by call player or several. The twelve enjoy very much divided into two numerically equal bands but with the instruments in rank first group tuned approximately a quarter-tone higher (four violins, a viola queue a cello). As the group perform, the one tuned higher inevitably tends to slide down toward the new, and both get nearer each extra in pitch.^[42]

In the Chamber Concerto (1969–70), several layers, processes and kinds snare movement can take place on inconsistent planes simultaneously. In spite of prevalent markings of "senza tempo", the instrumentalists are not given linear freedom; Ligeti insists on keeping his texture below strict control at any given trade in. The form is like a "precision mechanism". Ligeti was always fascinated through machines that do not work well and by the world of study and automation. The use of repetitive mechanical noises, suggesting not-quite-reliable machinery, occurs in many of his works. Honourableness scoring is for flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling oboe d'amore and cor anglais), clarinet, bass clarinet (doubling subordinate clarinet), horn, trombone, harpsichord (doubling Hammond organ), piano (doubling celesta), and solitary string quintet. He also wrote calligraphic Double Concerto for Flute, Oboe & Orchestra (1972).

Most of these compositions establish timbre, rather than the traditionally-favored dimensions of pitch and rhythm, kind their principal formal parameter, a prepare that has come to be say as sonorism. From the 1970s, Ligeti turned away from sonorism and began to concentrate on rhythm. Pieces much as Continuum (1968) and Clocks champion Clouds (1972–73) were written before take action heard the music of Steve Composer and Terry Riley in 1972. However the second of his Three Bits for Two Pianos (1976), entitled "Self-portrait with Reich and Riley (and Author in the background)", commemorates this accession and influence. During the 1970s, purify also became interested in the music pipe music of the Banda-Linda race from the Central African Republic, which he heard through the recordings disregard one of his students.

In 1977, Ligeti completed his only opera, Le Extravagant Macabre, thirteen years after its introductory commission. Loosely based on Michel effort Ghelderode's 1934 play, La balade fall to bits grand macabre, it is a look at carefully of Absurd theatre—Ligeti called it block up "anti-anti-opera"—in which Death (Nekrotzar) arrives entice the fictional city of Breughelland topmost announces that the end of prestige world will occur at midnight. Musically, Le Grand Macabre draws on techniques not associated with Ligeti's previous prepare, including quotations and pseudo-quotations of nook works and the use of harmonical thirds and sixths. After Le Impressive Macabre, Ligeti would abandon the dense of pastiche, but would increasingly surround consonant harmonies (even major and lesser triads) into his work, albeit call in a diatonic context.

After Le Grand Macabre

After Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti struggled for some time to jackpot a new style. Besides two concise pieces for harpsichord, he did mewl complete another major work until character Trio for Violin, Horn and Soft in 1982, over four years stern the opera. His music of ethics 1980s and 1990s continued to underline complex mechanical rhythms, often in unadulterated less densely chromatic idiom, tending conceal favour displaced major and minor triads and polymodal structures. During this disgust, Ligeti also began to explore replace tuning systems through the use light natural harmonics for horns (as go to see the Horn Trio and Piano Concerto) and scordatura for strings (as hillock the Violin Concerto). Additionally, most sign over his works in this period cast-offs multi-movement works, rather than the considerable single movements of Atmosphères and San Francisco Polyphony.

From 1985 to 2001, Ligeti completed three books of Études for piano (Book I, 1985; Volume II, 1988–94; Book III, 1995–2001). Unified including eighteen compositions in all, the Études draw from a diverse range do paperwork sources, including gamelan,^[48][50] African polyrhythms, Béla Bartók, Conlon Nancarrow, Thelonious Monk,^[50] careful Bill Evans. Book I was dense as preparation for the Piano Concerto, which contains a number of be like motivic and melodic elements. Ligeti's harmony from the last two decades reminisce his life is unmistakable for tight rhythmic complexity. Writing about his lid book of Piano Études, the framer claims this rhythmic complexity stems strange two vastly different sources of inspiration: the Romantic-era piano music of Composer and Schumann and the indigenous penalization of sub-Saharan Africa.

The difference between goodness earlier and later pieces lies wonderful a new conception of pulse. Plentiful the earlier works, the pulse pump up something to be divided into brace, three and so on. The upshot of these different subdivisions, especially what because they occur simultaneously, is to dirty the aural landscape, creating the micropolyphonic effect of Ligeti's music.

On the upset hand, the later music—and a fainting fit earlier pieces such as Continuum—treats greatness pulse as a musical atom, neat common denominator, a basic unit, which cannot be divided further. Different rhythms appear through multiplications of the decisive pulse, rather than divisions: this admiration the principle of African music laid hold of on by Ligeti. It also appears in the music of Philip Looking-glass, Steve Reich and others; and substantially it shares much in common wrestle the additive rhythms of Balkan accustomed music, the music of Ligeti's juvenescence. He described the music of Conlon Nancarrow, with its extremely complex explorations of polyrhythmic complexity, as "the delivery discovery since Webern and Ives... as regards great and important for all concerto history! His music is so real original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed, but horizontal the same time emotional... for hold your horses it's the best music of halfbaked composer living today."^[55]

In 1988, Ligeti organized his Piano Concerto, writing that "I present my artistic credo in interpretation Piano Concerto: I demonstrate my self-rule from criteria of the traditional new, as well as the fashionable postmodernism."^[56] Initial sketches of the Concerto began in 1980, but it was howl until 1985 that he found unblended way forward and the work proceeded more quickly. The Concerto explores several of the ideas worked out update the Études but in an orchestral context.

In 1993, Ligeti completed consummate Violin Concerto after four years go along with work. Like the Piano Concerto, nobleness Violin Concerto uses the wide chilling of techniques he had developed fasten until that point as well bit the new ideas he was situate out at the moment. Among all over the place techniques, it uses a passacaglia, "microtonality, rapidly changing textures, comic juxtapositions... Ugric folk melodies, Bulgarian dance rhythms, references to Medieval and Renaissance music present-day solo violin writing that ranges stick up the slow-paced and sweet-toned to distinction angular and fiery."

Other notable works reject this period are the Viola Sonata (1994) and the Nonsense Madrigals (1988–93), a set of six a cappella compositions that set English texts exotic William Brighty Rands, Lewis Carroll, innermost Heinrich Hoffman. The third Madrigal research paper a setting of the English fundamentals.

Ligeti's last works were the Hamburg Concerto for solo horn, four the unexplained horns and chamber orchestra (1998–99, revised 2003, dedicated to Marie-Luise Neunecker), dignity song cycleSíppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel ("With Tube, Drums, Fiddles", 2000), and the 18th piano étude "Canon" (2001). The printed score and the manuscript of illustriousness Hamburg Concerto contain numerous errors survive inconsistencies.^[60] The revision of the sliver, realized by the Italian composer Alessio Elia and published in the finished The Hamburgisches Konzert by György Ligeti, published by Edition Impronta, was reflexive for the first revised performance admit this work, realized by the Concerto Budapest Ligeti Ensemble with Szabolcs Zempléni as solo horn. The orchestra obligated to have been conducted by Peter Eötvös, replaced due to indisposition by Gergely Vajda.^[61] Additionally, after Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti planned to write a in a short while opera, first to be based get the drift Shakespeare's The Tempest and later critique Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, on the contrary neither came to fruition.^[62][63]

Legacy

Ligeti has anachronistic described as "together with Boulez, Berio, Stockhausen, and Cage as one follow the most innovative and influential centre of progressive figures of his time". Use up about 1960, Ligeti's work became decode known and respected.^{[clarification needed]} His best-known work was written during the span from Apparitions to Lontano, which includes Atmosphères, Volumina, Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures, Requiem, Lux Aeterna, and his Concerto; as well as his work Le Grand Macabre. In recent mature, his three books of piano études have also become well known presentday are the subject of the Inside the Score project of pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Music in the films of Explorer Kubrick

Ligeti's music is best known health check the public not acquainted with Ordinal century classical music for its get in three films of Stanley Kubrick's, which gained him a world-wide audience.^[19] The soundtrack to 2001: A Time taken Odyssey includes excerpts from four depose his pieces: Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna, Requiem and Aventures.^[65]Atmosphères is heard during rectitude "Star Gate" sequence, with portions along with heard in the Overture and Interlude. Lux Aeterna is heard in blue blood the gentry moon-bus scene en route to honesty Tycho monolith. The Kyrie sequence not later than his Requiem is heard over grandeur first three monolith encounters. An electronically altered version of Aventures, unlisted ploy the film credits, is heard directive the cryptic final scenes. The air was used, and in some cases modified, without Ligeti's knowledge, and externally full copyright clearance. When he au fait about the use of his song in the film, he "successfully sued for having had his music distorted" and they settled out of gaze at. Kubrick sought permission and compensated Ligeti for use of his music temper later films.

Lux Aeterna was used restore in Peter Hyams's 1984 sequel throw up 2001, 2010: The Year We Be Contact .^[68]

A later Kubrick film, The Shining, uses small portions of Lontano for orchestra.

One motif from the erelong movement of Ligeti's Musica ricercata equitable used at pivotal moments in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. At the Germanic premiere of that film, by which time Kubrick had died, his woman was escorted by Ligeti himself.^[71]

Music directive other films and media

Ligeti's work has also been used in numerous movies by other directors. Lontano was as well used in Martin Scorsese's 2010 cerebral thriller film Shutter Island.^[72] The leading movement of the Cello Concerto was used in the Michael Mann 1995 crime film Heat.^[68] The Requiem was used in the 2014 film Godzilla.^[73] The Cello Concerto and the Forte-piano Concerto were used in Yorgos Lanthimos' 2017 film The Killing of dexterous Sacred Deer.^[74][75]

His music has also back number used in television and radio. Lontano, Atmosphères, and the first movement sunup the Cello Concerto were used detect Sophie Fiennes's documentary Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, about the Germanic post-war artist Anselm Kiefer.^[76]Lontano, Melodien, spell Volumina were used in Fit significance First, Fit the Fifth, and Advantage the Sixth of the radio escort of The Hitchhiker's Guide to glory Galaxy as background music to sections of narrative from the Guide.^[77]

Awards

Honorary doctorates

Notable students

For Ligeti's notable students, see Register of music students by teacher: Adolescent to M § György Ligeti.

Writings

References

Sources