György Ligeti was an adventurer in form and expression and a great visionary of contemporary music. His richly varied output takes a special position in its musical quality and uncompromising individuality. Ligeti moved far away from aesthetic trends and methods all his life. He was characterized by fresh and unorthodox ideas, any form of dogmatism was foreign to his nature, his entire oeuvre is marked by radical turning points. Admired and hugely influential in the profession, the sensual accessibility of his music has won the hearts of audiences everywhere.

Born in Dicsőszentmárton (today Tîrnăveni), Transylania, on 28 May 1923, the son of Hungarian-Jewish parents, he studied at the Klausenburg conservatory with Ferenc Farkas from 1941 to 1943, later (1945-49) at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest with Ferenc Farkas, Sándor Veress, Pál Járdányi and Lajos Bárdos. Very soon he developed the micropolyphony which later was to become one of the most significant features of his music. In his early pieces, such as the a-cappella choral work "Éjszaka Reggel" and his first successful work in the West, "Apparitions", this style is already extremely distinctive. In December 1956, after the Hungarian Revolution, he fled to the west, for artistic and political reasons. . Working as a free-lancer at the West German Radio electronic studios in Cologne (1957-58) he made an intensive study of  the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel and Pierre Boulez,  which found its musical expression in Artikulation (1958). This work, with Atmosphères, the orchestral work he created in 1961, made Ligeti instantly well-known. In this piece, he worked almost completely without traditional melodic, harmonic and rhythmic parameters and concentrated on sounds with constantly changing textures. ‘Micropolyphony’, he once described, ‘means such a dense tissue that the individual parts become inaudible and only the resulting intermingling harmonies are effective as a form'.

After his intensive work in Cologne in the 1950s and the development of micropolyphony in the 1960s, Ligeti’s personal style became simpler and more transparent in the 1970s. And as if wanting to withdraw from the predominating musical tendencies, he began to use tonal sounds again. He said: 'I no longer listen to rules on what is to be regarded as modern and what as old-fashioned.' His only full-length stage work Le Grand Macabre was inspired by the theatre of the absurd and is teeming with operetta-like wit and black humour. The composer wanted to communicate more directly with audiences: 'Stage action and music should be dangerous and bizarre, absolutely exaggerated, absolutely crazy.'

In the 1980s and 1990s, Ligeti expanded his musical horizons again, incorporating structural principles of African drumming music into his works: the fanatic of the intricate developed new complex polyrhythmic techniques. They form the basis of the 3 collections of his Études pour piano which are considered to be the most important piano music of the late 20th century.

György Ligeti travelled a long road: from Romanian folk music and the tonal language of his fellow countryman Béla Bartók to his own cosmos of sounds. The mentor of a whole generation of composers, he wanted to 'fuse the fear of death with laughter'.  

Ligeti was honoured with all the world’s major musical awards, including the Grawemayer Award, the Praemium Imperiale, the Ernst-von-Siemens Music Award, the Sibelius Prize, and the Kyoto-Prize.  He died on 12 June 2006 in Vienna.