Long Live the Spirit ot Gyorgy Ligeti!

Fine Obit for composer Gyorgy Ligeti over at the Washington Post last month.

"Because one never knew quite what to expect before hearing a new Ligeti work, his music sometimes startled listeners. Yet this eclecticism allowed him to escape some paradoxical aesthetic traps that were endemic to late 20th-century composition. He insisted that his music was "neither tonal nor atonal" and while he never blithely reiterated the musical language of the past, neither did he strive to be modern or avant-garde at the expense of communication with an audience."

Nice to know the example of originals. Perhaps his most famous work (to me, anyway) was his choral piece, "Lux Aeterna," which accompanied the moving discovery scenes in the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.