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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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Gyorgy Ligeti
Age: 83 †
Born: 1923
Born: May 28
Died: 2006
Died: June 11
Composer
Illustrator
Librettist
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Pianist
University Teacher
Tarnaveni
Years
Began
Prelude
Things
Harmony
Bach
Never
Level
Compose
Levels
Advanced
Knew
Studied
Simple
Fifteen
Music
Hardly
Play
Piano

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But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
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Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.
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I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
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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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However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.
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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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There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
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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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People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.
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For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.
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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.
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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 think a composer is always interested in his last work.
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In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity
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New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock
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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 don't use old music.
Gyorgy Ligeti