Quote

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

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Gyorgy Ligeti
Age: 83 †
Born: 1923
Born: May 28
Died: 2006
Died: June 11
Composer
Illustrator
Librettist
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Pianist
University Teacher
Tarnaveni
Back
Allowed
Avant
Find
Prison
Escaping
Everything
Neither
Taboo
Must
Wall
Prisoner
Going
Simply
Composer
Way
Cannot
Continuing
Past
Allowing
Tonality
Today
Escape
Garde

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There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
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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.
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New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock
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For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.
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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.
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First of all I listen to music. I like music.
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However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.
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But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
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Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland
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But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.
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In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.
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I don't use old music.
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There was a very famous musician in our family. He was a great violinist, an internationally known teacher. He was Leopold Auer.
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I think a composer is always interested in his last work.
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People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.
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My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
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In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity
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I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
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