Top 42 Quotes & Sayings by Gyorgy Ligeti

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti.

Last updated on September 18, 2024.

György Sándor Ligeti was a Hungarian-Austrian composer of contemporary classical music. He has been described as "one of the most important avant-garde composers in the latter half of the twentieth century" and "one of the most innovative and influential among progressive figures of his time".

Hungarian - Composer | May 28, 1923 - June 12, 2006

Source: Wikipedia

I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.

Gyorgy Ligeti

It isn't false modesty when I say this, but although I am supposed to be a famous person it doesn't mean anything to me. I just sit at home and work.

Gyorgy Ligeti

But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.

Gyorgy Ligeti

Perhaps the better word is emotional yes, I am an emotional man.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I like to stay home and listen to recordings.

Gyorgy Ligeti

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.

Gyorgy Ligeti

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

Gyorgy Ligeti

Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.

Gyorgy Ligeti

$Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music. — © Gyorgy Ligeti$

Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.

Gyorgy Ligeti

If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.

Gyorgy Ligeti

Steinberg is great. I should like to meet him.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I listen to all kinds of music - new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.

Gyorgy Ligeti

However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

Gyorgy Ligeti

But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.

Gyorgy Ligeti

Gesualdo was very important to me, I wanted to do something which corresponded to him.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I don't use old music.

Gyorgy Ligeti

First of all I listen to music. I like music.

Gyorgy Ligeti

Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.

Gyorgy Ligeti

In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which isolated the Jewish culture.

Gyorgy Ligeti

Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully.

Gyorgy Ligeti

My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.

Gyorgy Ligeti

When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee.

Gyorgy Ligeti

Well I live in Vienna with my wife and son, and I teach in Hamburg, there will be no changes in that respect.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.

Gyorgy Ligeti

For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.

Gyorgy Ligeti

People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.

Gyorgy Ligeti

New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

Gyorgy Ligeti

When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee

Gyorgy Ligeti

There was a very famous musician in our family. He was a great violinist, an internationally known teacher. He was Leopold Auer.

Gyorgy Ligeti

New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock

Gyorgy Ligeti

Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.

Gyorgy Ligeti