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.