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.