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

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
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More quotes by Gyorgy Ligeti

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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.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.
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My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland
Gyorgy Ligeti
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When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee
Gyorgy Ligeti
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There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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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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In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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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.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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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.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.
Gyorgy Ligeti
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New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock
Gyorgy Ligeti
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In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity
Gyorgy Ligeti
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I think a composer is always interested in his last work.
Gyorgy Ligeti