Happy Birthday, György Ligeti! A 100-year Celebration
"I almost always associate sounds with color, form, and consistency, just as conversely I associate form, color, and material texture with every acoustic sensation. Even abstract concepts such as quantities, relationships, connections and processes appear to me sensualized and have their place in an imaginary space."
- György Ligeti
György Ligeti was born in Dicsőszentmárton (now Târnǎveni, Transylvania/Romania) on May 28, 1923 to Hungarian Jewish parents. From 1941 to 1943 he studied with Ferenc Farkas at the Cluj-Napoca Conservatory, and from 1945 to 1949 at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest with Sándor Veress, Pál Járdányi and Lajos Bárdos. After the suppression of the uprising in his homeland, he left Hungary in December 1956 for both political and artistic reasons.
During his time as a freelancer in the Studio for Electronic Music of WDR Cologne (1957 to 1958), he intensively studied the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel and Pierre Boulez. In the 1960s, Ligeti served as a lecturer at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music and as a visiting professor at the Stockholm Academy of Music. from 1969 to 1970 he was a fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service in Berlin, and in 1972 he was composer in residence at Stanford University in California. A year later he was appointed professor of composition at the Hamburg Musikhochschule. As a university teacher (until 1989) and as a composer, Ligeti had a decisive influence on international contemporary music and became the musical-aesthetic point of reference for an entire generation. He died in Vienna on June 12, 2006.
In his case, the unfortunate fact that the death of a creative artist is accompanied by a temporary lull in his reputation does not apply: his music continues to be programmed with the self-evidence that is due to a classic.
Conception: Simone Fontanelli & Chungki Min
