György Sándor Ligeti (/ˈlɪɡəti/; Hungarian: [ˈliɡɛti ˈɟørɟ ˈʃaːndor]; 28 May 1923 – 12 June 2006) was a Hungarian-Austrian composer of contemporary classical music.

After experimenting with electronic music in Cologne, Germany, his breakthrough came with orchestral works such as Atmosphères, for which he used a technique he later dubbed micropolyphony.

In 1941 Ligeti received his initial musical training at the conservatory in Kolozsvár (Cluj),[7] and during the summers privately with Pál Kadosa in Budapest.

[8] Following World War II, Ligeti returned to his studies in Budapest, graduating in 1949 from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music.

However, after a year he returned to Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, this time as a teacher of harmony, counterpoint, and musical analysis.

[10] Due to the restrictions of the communist government, communications between Hungary and the West by then had become difficult, and Ligeti and other artists were effectively cut off from recent developments outside the Eastern Bloc.

In December 1956, two months after the Hungarian uprising was violently suppressed by the Soviet Army, Ligeti fled to Vienna with his ex-wife Vera Spitz.

[17] These people included the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig, both then working on groundbreaking electronic music.

After about three years' working with them, he fell out with the Cologne School of Electronic Music, because there was much factional in-fighting: "there were [sic] a lot of political fighting because different people, like Stockhausen, like Kagel wanted to be first.

[23] Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel and Art Secretary Franz Morak [de] both paid tribute to Ligeti.

His largest work in this period was a graduation composition for the Budapest Academy, entitled Cantata for Youth Festival, for four vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra.

Composed of a single movement divided into seventeen contrasting sections linked motivically,[32] the First String Quartet is Ligeti's first work to suggest a personal style of composition.

[35] Micropolyphony can be used to create the nearly static but slowly evolving works such as Atmosphères in which the individual instruments become hidden in a complex web of sound.

In this piece, Ligeti abandoned conventional music notation, instead using diagrams to represent general pitch areas, duration, and flurries of notes.

Though, at about half an hour, it is the longest piece he had composed up to that point,[39] Ligeti sets only about half of the Requiem's traditional text: the "Introitus", the "Kyrie" (a completely chromatic quasi-fugue, where the parts are a montage of melismatic, skipping micropolyphony), and the "Dies irae"—dividing the latter sequence into two parts, "De die judicii" and "Lacrimosa".

The pizzicato third movement is a machine-like studies, hard and mechanical, whereby the parts playing repeated notes create a "granulated" continuum.

[42] Ramifications (1968–69), completed a year before the Chamber Concerto, is scored for an ensemble of strings in twelve parts—seven violins, two violas, two cellos and a double bass—each of which may be taken by one player or several.

In spite of frequent markings of "senza tempo", the instrumentalists are not given linear freedom; Ligeti insists on keeping his texture under strict control at any given moment.

Most of these compositions establish timbre, rather than the traditionally-favored dimensions of pitch and rhythm, as their principal formal parameter, a practice that has come to be known as sonorism.

During the 1970s, he also became interested in the polyphonic pipe music of the Banda-Linda tribe from the Central African Republic, which he heard through the recordings of one of his students.

Loosely based on Michel de Ghelderode's 1934 play, La balade du grand macabre, it is a work of Absurd theatre—Ligeti called it an "anti-anti-opera"—in which Death (Nekrotzar) arrives in the fictional city of Breughelland and announces that the end of the world will occur at midnight.

After Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti would abandon the use of pastiche,[47] but would increasingly incorporate consonant harmonies (even major and minor triads) into his work, albeit not in a diatonic context.

Besides two short pieces for harpsichord, he did not complete another major work until the Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano in 1982, over four years after the opera.

His music of the 1980s and 1990s continued to emphasise complex mechanical rhythms, often in a less densely chromatic idiom, tending to favour displaced major and minor triads and polymodal structures.

Comprising eighteen compositions in all, the Études draw from a diverse range of sources, including gamelan,[48][49][50] African polyrhythms, Béla Bartók, Conlon Nancarrow, Thelonious Monk,[50][51] and Bill Evans.

Different rhythms appear through multiplications of the basic pulse, rather than divisions: this is the principle of African music seized on by Ligeti.

Among other techniques, it uses a passacaglia,[58] "microtonality, rapidly changing textures, comic juxtapositions... Hungarian folk melodies, Bulgarian dance rhythms, references to Medieval and Renaissance music and solo violin writing that ranges from the slow-paced and sweet-toned to the angular and fiery.

[61] Additionally, after Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti planned to write a second opera, first to be based on Shakespeare's The Tempest and later on Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but neither came to fruition.

In recent years, his three books of piano études have also become well known and are the subject of the Inside the Score project of pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Lontano, Atmosphères, and the first movement of the Cello Concerto were used in Sophie Fiennes's documentary Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, about the German post-war artist Anselm Kiefer.