GYÖRGY LIGETI

György Ligeti was born in Transylvania in 1923. Growing up in Eastern Europe at that time, he was initially isolated from developments in Western contemporary music. However, after emigrating to Vienna in 1956, his compositional style underwent a significant shift. Electronic music exerts a strong influence on his subsequent work, although he composed only a handful of pieces in that medium. His large orchestral scores of the early 1960s, such as Apparitions and Atmosphères reveal a strong concern with sonically derived musical organisation, which carries through into later chamber music (although this is somewhat tempered in his more recent works).

Ligeti is perhaps best-known as the composer of the moon and stargate sequences used in Stanley Kubrick's "2001 A Space Odyssey".