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
Find
Prison
Escaping
Everything
Neither
Taboo
Must
Wall
Prisoner
Going
Simply
Composer
Way
Cannot
Continuing
Past
Allowing
Tonality
Today
Escape
Garde
Back
Allowed
Avant

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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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I think a composer is always interested in his last work.
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Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.
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But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
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My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
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However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.
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There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
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First of all I listen to music. I like music.
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In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity
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When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee
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But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.
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I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.
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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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New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock
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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 don't use old music.
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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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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 read such boring things. Life is too short.
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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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