György Ligeti passed away this week at the age of 83. Born into a Hungarian-speaking town in Romania in 1923 and later moving to Budapest, he spent much of his life in Vienna, after the Hungarian revolution forced him to flee the country in 1956. The city, already the home of several avant garde composers such as Boulez and Stockhausen, served to bring him into contact with progressive schools of thought. His dense, texturally based compositional style attracted Stanley Kubrick's attention when the director was searching for a musical representation of the alien culture in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick incorporated Atmosphères, as well as excerpts from Aeterna and Requiem into the soundtrack of his film, but without the composer's permission.
In addition to experiments in rhythmic organization, chromaticism, and electronic music, Ligeti also developed a technique he named micropolyphony. According to Ligeti, micropolyphony involved the nearly imperceptible change of harmony: "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." Despite (or perhaps because of) the popularity of serial music in mid-century Vienna (which after all was the city of Schönberg, the composer who developed the serial technique), Ligeti chose not to jump onto compositional bandwagons.
To find out more about this distinguished composer, please investigate the transcript of an interview with Ligeti that the BBC has published on its website. One can also download the interview.
Although in the BBC interview Ligeti claimed his music was not based upon mathematical principles, some of his favorite authors included the mathematicians Lewis Carroll and Douglas Hofstadter, and he also enjoyed fractal geometry.
