It's where we're all headed, of course, but not all composers make you aware of the fact. I'm talking not just about our inevitable demises, and the end of things as we know them, but something even bigger: the heat-death of the universe. That's how Thomas Adès describes the essential quality that he hears in György Ligeti's music, in every piece the Hungarian composer wrote, from his earliest works before he fled to the west under cover of sackcloth in a train during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, to the very last music he wrote in the years before his death in Vienna in 2006.
That creative journey encompasses some of the richest music of the 20th century, and reveals an imaginative world of dizzying variety and expressive power. It's no surprise that of the entire post-war generation who were at the forefront of the avant garde in the 1950s and 60s, it's Ligeti who is played the most. And here are just three reasons why: listen to the Kyrie of the Requiem for one of the darkest visions of musical terror ever imagined, then revel in the rhythmic glitter and complexity of a piece like the first Piano Etude, and relish the warped harmonic world of the Horn Trio, like looking at Brahms or Schumann through a distorting mirror.
But before we get to the potentially infinite visions of his music and what I think Adès means by that "heat-death" idea, Ligeti is the 20th century composer with the most cosmic connotations in popular consciousness. That's thanks to the way Stanley Kubrick used – Richard Steinitz, in his biography, relates how Ligeti's music was initially used without permission) – Ligeti's music in his movies starting with 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 2001, and in The Shining, too, Ligeti's music (along with Penderecki's and Bartók's) is the sound of the other, the alien, the supernatural: passages from the Requiem dramatise the images of 2001's monolith – music of teeming, horrifying vastness and unearthly intensity - and Ligeti and the other modernists become the sounds of Jack Nicholson's psychological dissemblage in The Shining.
But the real otherness, the real distinctiveness of Ligeti's music is much richer than what Kubrick heard in it. From the start of his life in the west, Ligeti was a permanently provocative thorn in the side of any of the received wisdoms and ideologies of the avant garde. Performances of his orchestral pieces from the late 50 and early 60s, Apparitions and Atmosphères (which the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle play at the Proms on 30 August) were a revelation of a new way of structuring music, of thinking about the possibilities for musical language. Instead of accepting at face value the diktats of the contemporary serialism, or any other of the –isms of the 50s, Ligeti's idea was to make texture as much of a driving force in musical architecture as pitch or rhythm, developing what he called a "micro-polyphony" of incredibly dense pile-ups of musical lines so that you're more aware of an ever-changing amorphous cloud of sound than the movement of individual instruments or voices. Sounds complicated? It is to conceive and to compose, but not to listen to: these uncanny textures smother, ooze, and slide into your ears in those orchestral pieces, or the Requiem, or Lux Aeterna for 16 voices.
Ligeti was not thinking of this music in a vacuum, or pretending that he could provide the definitive answer to the challenges of finding a post-war musical idiom. He never trod any musical or political party line: not least because he had devastating personal experience of where that kind of thinking could lead. As Hungarian Jews, his brother and father were killed in concentration camps, but his mother survived Auschwitz; after the war, he saw the brutality and intolerance of communism at first hand. The last thing he wanted to become as a creative artist was a musical ideologue or despot. I met him when he was already ill in 2003, and he told me that he was against the idea of "plannification" in music; saying how he could never make a pre-planned musical form as Stockhausen did, for example, in his Licht cycle. Ligeti also said to me, "I am extremely far away from messianic thinking."
Ligeti's principled resistance of system-for-system's sake – whether Boulez's version of serialism, Cage's chance, or Xenakis's stochasticism – meant that he had to find new forms, new kinds of expression, in virtually every new piece he wrote. His searches and his influences spread far beyond the conventional confines of western culture: the music of the Aka pygmies was one of the catalysts that unlocked the last couple of decades of his creativity, above all the rhythmic invention of the Piano Concerto and the Piano Etudes; he was impressed by the sounds and processes of American minimalism in a way that no other avant garde composer in Europe was; and his mind was open to the furthest reaches of contemporary mathematics. He became fascinated by the new ideas of chaos theory that Heinz-Otto Peitgen developed in the 1980s, and he extrapolated some of those ideas into music such as the 4th movement of the Piano Concerto, a chaotic ride to the abyss of continually disrupting, self-annihilating rhythmic patterns.
There are, however, constants in Ligeti's musical imagination. One of the most important is the idea of the absurd. Ligeti's world of imagination was simultaneously an asylum, a place of refuge, and a place to process the horror of the 20th century's great geo-political nightmares through which he lived. As a child, he invented a self-sufficient world of his creation that he called Kylwiria; as an adult, he was a lover of Lewis Carroll (he wanted to write an opera based on Alice in Wonderland) and the surreal linguistic games and imagery of Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres. One of his very last pieces was Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel, "With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles", a setting of Weöres's poems for percussion quartet and mezzo-soprano. They are, typically for Ligeti, on a tiny scale, and they make sounds like nothing else: each of the seven songs is simultaneously redolent of folk music and of modernist complexity, of childish immediacy and decidedly adult sophistication. Yet this music is absolutely, definitively new, and each number conjures its own little-but-large world of absurdist expression and resonance. They are also, I think, strangely melancholic. The Sippal songs have that quality that all the best absurdist poetry does of making you confront big ideas through lightness of touch, humour, and sleight of hand.
Ligeti's pieces are often short, even miniature, but it's as if that smallness of scale makes you aware of some gigantic vacuum around them. The first Piano Etude writes out a nihilistically destructive game of rhythmic abandon, and it does it all in a couple of minutes; there are moments in the Violin Concerto in which you don't know whether to laugh or cry at the sounds of the swanee whistles and ocarinas you're hearing in the orchestra; the whole of his opera Le Grand Macabre is both a witty satire on death and a chilling apocalyptic vision. In other words, you hear a reflection of the horrors that Ligeti knew and saw during his lifetime, and you hear also his coming to terms with art's essential futility in the face of all that tragedy. And yet, in the attempt to reflect on or escape from those experiences, Ligeti's music is a clarion-call for the fundamental importance of that supposedly futile artistic effort. It's music that gives you a glimpse of the heat-death of the universe – and the necessity to keep going, to keep composing, to keep living in the face of that nihilistic fate that awaits us, even if it all, in the end, amounts to nothing. It doesn't, of course … but it's that existential tension that gives Ligeti's music its humanity, and it's one reason his work, I think, will only become more and more central to every performer's repertoire and every music-lover's ears.
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