György Sándor Ligeti was born on 28 May 1923 at Diciosânmartin in Romania, into a Hungarian Jewish family, and moved to Cluj at six. He began his training at the Kolozsvár conservatory in 1941 and studied privately in the summers with Pál Kadosa. In 1944 his education was broken off when the Horthy regime sent him to a forced labour brigade; his brother was deported to Mauthausen and his parents to Auschwitz, and only he and his mother survived. He graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest in 1949, having studied with Kadosa, Ferenc Farkas, Zoltán Kodály and Sándor Veress, did ethnomusicological fieldwork on Transylvanian Hungarian folk music, and taught harmony, counterpoint and analysis at the Academy from 1950 to 1956. In December 1956, two months after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, he fled to Vienna, leaving most of his Hungarian manuscripts behind. He took Austrian citizenship in 1968 and died in Vienna on 12 June 2006.

A few weeks after reaching Vienna he went to Cologne, worked in the electronic music studio alongside Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig and attended the Darmstadt courses, and emerged with the dense, slow-shifting orchestral textures of Atmosphères, for which he coined the term micropolyphony. After the anti-anti-opera Le Grand Macabre he turned away from chromatic saturation toward polyrhythm, a direction that produced the late Piano Études. He was professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg from 1973 until his retirement in 1989, teaching Hans Abrahamsen, Unsuk Chin and Michael Daugherty. He wrote no film scores, but Stanley Kubrick’s use of existing pieces — above all in 2001: A Space Odyssey — carried his music to an audience that never heard it in a concert hall.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Ligeti
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q154331