Words matter. These are the best Gyorgy Ligeti Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I listen to all kinds of music – new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.
Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.
Perhaps the better word is emotional yes, I am an emotional man.
My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist – a painter, a decorative painter.
First of all I listen to music. I like 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 only want to give a metaphysic for my music.
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.
In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.
Steinberg is great. I should like to meet him.
When I was younger I was completely without money – when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee.
I think a composer is always interested in his last work.
I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.
I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.
If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.
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.
I don’t read such boring things. Life is too short.
Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.
But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.
But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully.
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.
For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.
I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.
I like to stay home and listen to recordings.
