György Ligeti

Born in 1923 in Diciosânmartin, Transylvania, then part of Romania, György Ligeti grew up in a Hungarian cultural environment before continuing his studies in Cluj and at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he studied with teachers including Zoltán Kodály. Deeply affected by the war, the Holocaust and the cultural constraints of communist Hungary, Ligeti left the country in 1956 for Vienna and later worked in Cologne, coming into contact with the avant-garde and electronic music circles. His compositional voice emerged around 1960 with works such as Apparitions (1958–1959), Atmosphères (1961), Requiem (1963–1965) and Lux Aeterna (1966), in which he developed dense textures, slowly transforming sound masses and a tightly woven polyphony he himself termed micropolyphony. Afterwards Ligeti broadened his language toward more contrasting forms sensitive to rhythm, metric displacement and overlapping pulses, as in Le Grand Macabre (1977), the Trio for violin, horn and piano (1982), the Piano Concerto (1985–1988) and the Études for piano composed between 1985 and 2001. He taught composition in Hamburg from 1973 to 1989, influencing several generations of composers, and his music reached far beyond the concert hall, notably in film.