György Ligeti

"Artistic freedom means being free of all sorts of blinders, even those of 'modernity.'" Working without blinders, György Ligeti (1923-2006) was engaged like no other contemporary composer with realities that were distance in both time and space: with important works in the whole of Europe's musical history just as much as with the music of non-European peoples, especially from southeast Asia and Africa. To this gaze beyond time and space corresponds a gaze beyond the borders of his own métier: toward literature and painting as well as to various fields within the natural sciences. In doing so he is not concerned with simply adopting what he has encountered. After he has researched the phenomena in detail, he fuses the stimuli he has absorbed in a process of "transculturation" into unmistakably Ligetian material.