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.