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.