Gyorgy Ligeti Quotes

When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee

I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.

I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.

Well I live in Vienna with my wife and son, and I teach in Hamburg, there will be no changes in that respect.

Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.

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.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock

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

However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.

I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

I listen to all kinds of music - new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.

I like to stay home and listen to recordings.

Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully

In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.

There was a very famous musician in our family. He was a great violinist, an internationally known teacher. He was Leopold Auer.

I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.

I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.

Perhaps the better word is emotional yes, I am an emotional man

Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.

I don't use old music.

Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland

For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity

But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.

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.

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.

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.

My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.

People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.