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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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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 know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.
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But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
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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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New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock
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However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.
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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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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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It isn't false modesty when I say this, but although I am supposed to be a famous person it doesn't mean anything to me. I just sit at home and work.
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I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
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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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My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
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There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
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I think a composer is always interested in his last work.
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For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.
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