Obituary: Gyorgy Ligeti, 1923-2006 {contemporary composer}

Gyorgy Ligeti was, along with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez, one of a group of composers which revolutionised postwar music.

Rejecting classical musical forms and creating often sparse and atonal works, they continually withstood the derision heaped upon them by generations of critics.
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Appointed Professor of Harmony, Counterpoint and Formal Analysis at the Budapest Conservatory in 1950, he fled the country in the wake of the Soviet invasion six years later.
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Perhaps his most notable, certainly his most famous, piece was Atmospheres from 1960.

This work featured, along with Ligeti's Requiem and Lux Aeterna, on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/292812.stm

The pieces mentioned are choral works; Ligeti also composed a great many instrumental pieces, including Volumina and Harmonies for organ, and the devilish Continuum for harpsichord.

For those of you less familiar with classical music, one of Ligeti's students, Andrew Powell (who also studied with Stockhausen and Boulez) was one of the essential collaborators on the Alan Parsons Project's first album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. There are flashes of the Ligeti influence in the tracks The Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher(of course), and Psychobabble(from the later Eye In The Sky album)

I'm not such a great fan of Ligeti's music, but this is a shame.

Seems to me the sparse and atonal is more important to understanding Ligeti than the rejecting classical forms. Actually that whole generation rejected classical forms because there was no reason to retain them. Functionally, I believe, musical forms exist because they organize repetition, and I think those composers realized that, now that we had recording technology, repetition was no longer necessary. And aesthetically, these forms, and functional harmony and all the trappings we normally think of as "classical" music, represented a world view that had demonstrated its moral turpitude with two horrendous world wars. (And this is in my view the real reason that we call these people the greatest generation: not just that they fought the war, but that they faced the horrors lurking behind the veil of civilization and did their best to defend what was decent, without cynicism. We will probably never know such nobility again...)

I learned a lot listening to him. It was not always easy to listen, hard to stay focused, but since I had to write a composition once in his style I learned to listen and enjoyed some of his compositions a lot.