VIENNA,
Austria (AP) -- Composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who fled Hungary after the 1956
revolution and gained fame for his opera "Le Grand Macabre" and
his work on the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space
Odyssey," died Monday. He was 83.
Ligeti,
celebrated as one of the world's leading 20th-century musical pioneers,
died in Vienna after a long illness, said Christiane Krauscheid, a
spokeswoman for his publisher, Germany-based Schott Music. Details were
unavailable, but Austrian media said he spent the last three years in a
wheelchair.
Ligeti
(pronounced lig'-ih-tee) was born in 1923 to Hungarian parents in the
predominantly ethnic Hungarian part of Romania's Transylvania region. His
father and brother later were murdered by the Nazis. He took Austrian
citizenship after fleeing his ex-communist homeland and became known for
"Macabre," which he wrote in 1978.
He began
studying music under Ferenc Farkas at the conservatory in Cluj, Romania,
in 1941, and continued his studies in Budapest. But in 1943, he was
arrested as a Jew and sentenced to forced labor for the rest of World War
II.
After the war,
Ligeti resumed his studies with Farkas and Sandor Veress at Budapest's
Franz Liszt Academy. After graduation in 1949, he did research on Romanian
folk music before returning to the academy as an instructor in harmony,
counterpoint and formal analysis.
Ligeti's early
work was heavily censored by Hungary's repressive regime, but his arrival
in Vienna in 1956 opened up new possibilities. In the Austrian capital, he
met key players in Western Europe's avant-garde music movement such as
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig and Herbert Eimert, who
invited him to join an electronic music studio at West Germany's state
radio in Cologne in 1957.
He won early
critical acclaim for his 1958 electronic composition "Artikulation"
and the orchestral "Apparitions." He gained notoriety for a
technique he called "micropolyphony," which wove together
musical color and texture in ways that transcended the traditional borders
of melody, harmony and rhythm.
Ligeti spoke
at least six languages, including his native Hungarian, German, French,
and English, said Stephen Ferguson, who worked as his assistant and editor
at Schott Music from 1992-96.
He was one of
the few avant-garde composers who found his way into the modern
program," Ferguson said. "He was fascinated by patters, but at
the same time created wonderful atmospheres, such as in '2001: A Space
Odyssey,' or in 'Clocks and Clouds.'
"He
reintroduced techniques of polyphony out of the tradition of Bach and
Palestrina with a playful and innovative sense of sound. He developed a
new sound - cluster sound - which fascinated Kubrick and propelled Legiti
to the top of the great composers of the second half of the 20th
century."
An excerpt
from his 1966 work "Lux Aeterna" was used on the bestselling
soundtrack for Kubrick's "Space Odyssey," winning Ligeti a
global audience.
Kubrick
returned to Ligeti in 1999, using the composer's Musica Ricercata II (Mesto,
rigido e cerimoniale), as the theme for what turned out to be his final
film, "Eyes Wide Shut."
More to read
about György Ligeti:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Ligeti
http://www.gyoergy-ligeti.de/
http://www.sonyclassical.com/artists/ligeti_top.htm
http://www.braunarts.com/ligeti/
