The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 68

The Guardian Friday October 17 2003 11 He survived communism, bucked every avant-garde trend, fell out with Boulez, then won fame through Kubrick's 2001. In a rare interview to celebrate his 80th birthday, Gyorgy Ligeti tells Tom Service about his new music RELUDE FOR PYGMIES omposer Gyorgy Ligeti lives in Vienna, his home a modernist oasis of tranquillity perched above the lush greenery of the Wienerwald. He turned 80 this year; he is physically frail, but and Sacre, Lontano was like a thin slice of sausage. Did he do this because he was angry with me, or because he wanted to conduct my music again? Anyway, then he started to conduct my pieces, and changed his attitude totally." Almost uniquely for an avant-garde composer, Ligeti's music was introduced to a massive popular audience, when the 1965 Requiem was used as part of the soundtrack for Kubrick's 2001 (Kubrick used Ligeti's music without permission, resulting in a tortuous legal battle over performing rights that took six years to resolve). But there is no more emphatic symbol of Ligeti's rejection of the supposed purity of the avant-garde than his 1977 opera, Le Grand Macabre.

A wild, scatological fantasy, inspired by the writings of Michel de Ghelderode and the paintings of Bosch and Brueghel, the piece is a riot of musical references, from severe baroque forms to surreal, modernist gestures. It opens with a prelude for car-horns and concludes with a relentless passacaglia; a concert performance of the piece by the BBC Symphony Orchestra is the finale of the Barbican's festival. fJBjhe Barbican's concerts are completed by the instru his mind is as mercurial as ever. "I am extremely far away from messianic thinking," he says. "Including Messiaen.

Who, in a way, was a great composer." Ligeti has a unique place in the history of 20th-century music: an avant-gardist who is familiar to a wide public (even if he has Stanley Kubrick's use of his music in 2001 to thank for that popularity), and an uncompromising modernist whose music revels in its connections with other cultures, other art forms, and the music of earlier centuries. He may now be a giant among contemporary composers, but it is a minor miracle that he survived the tumult of central European history. Born a Hungarian Jew in what was then Romanian Transylvania, he lived through the occupation of the Nazis, and was the only member of his family to escape deportation to the concentration camps. Of all those, only his mother survived. "Somehow I am still living today, by a mistake, by chance," he says.

There were brief years of optimism in liberated Budapest after the war, where he enrolled at the conservatory with fellow composer Gyorgy Kurtag. "But although the commu mental concertos, and the ongoing sequence of Piano Etudes that Ligeti began in 1985. According to his favourite pianist, Pierre-L 'V Laurent Aimard, these works were a "completely new thing: something never seen or heard before. They opened the door of a musical country with a fantastic power of imagination, and transformed the repertoire of my One of the major influences on this new musical terrain was the incredibly complex polyphony of African pygmy tribes, and a group of musicians from the Aka tribe perform their music alongside the Etudes as part of Ligeti at 80. In synthesising the influences of this African music with chaos theory and fractal geometry, the Etudes also opened the door to Ligeti's later works, and the glittering rhythms and textures of the concertos for piano and violin.

The most recent concerto is the Hamburg Concerto for solo horn. The soloist is surrounded by the weird sounds of a quartet of natural horns, playing in a different tuning system, and creating a halo of shimmering, microtonal music. It's a piece that only reached a definitive state last year. Originally in six movements, there are now seven aphoristic sections. "How long a piece should be is a very mysterious question," Ligeti says.

"Why a certain form is ready or not ready I cannot say. I had the feeling that the piece needed two more movements, but when I heard Hymnus, the seventh movement, I knew that it was enough. With me, the plan and the piece develop at the same rate. I don't believe in making plans. In architecture you have to.

If you build a house without a plan, it will fall down. But in the other arts, you don't need one: those huge paintings by Brueghel, full of alot of small figures, do they have a rigid composition? I don't think so. Or Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights: it doesn't have a plan And neither do the works of Shakespeare, or Proust, or the plays of Ionesco, or Beethoven's late string quartets." Ligeti's imagination is spinning off again, making connections across cultures and art forms; an endless curiosity that shows no sign of abating as he enters his ninth decade. Ligeti at 80 is at the Barbican, London, tomorrow and Sunday. Box office: 020-7638 8891.

mm nist dictatorship was different in style to the Nazis," Ligeti says, "it was also terrible. In a dictatorship you don't live your life." Many of his works of the late 1940s and early 1950s were censored, but he still managed to find his own voice in pieces that have only recently come to light. The exotic and exuberant Romanian Concerto, for instance, written in 1951, was suppressed by the communists, and receives its first complete performance in Britain only this year, as part of Ligeti at 80, the Barbican's celebratory weekend of concerts, talks and films. Ligeti knew that he had to get out of Hungary, and the story of his flight from Budapest to the west is one of the enduring legends of 20th century music. He finally decided to escape during the uprising of October 1956, which was ruthlessly crushed by the Soviets; he remembers emerging from his bunker to listen to illegal broadcasts of contemporary music, like early electronic pieces by Stockhausen, in the midst of exploding shells and street fighting.

He fled with his wife on a train, concealed from the Soviets under post-bags, and after crawling through the mud of no-man's-land, arrived in Austria in December 1956. You might expect the music of this remarkable life to express a searing, protesting intensity. But for all its directness, it is neither politically charged nor nihilistic. He has said that "anyone who has been through horrifying experiences is not likely to create terrifying works of art, in all seriousness. He is more likely to alienate." That "alienation" is expressed as uncompromising musical independence: his music suspends and transfigures its influences, from east European folk music to African polyrhythms, from literary surrealism to fractal geometry.

That spirit of individualism made Ligeti one of the most respected members of the post-war avant-garde, and a radical and sometimes dissenting voice in the community of composers led by Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. He worked with Stockhausen in Cologne in the late 1950s. "I learnt a lot from him, and I hugely admired his way of He fled with his wife on a train, conceaSed from the Soviets under post-bags biographer, "and they made a tremendous impact on someone brought up on serialism. The music was so astonishingly refreshing, and symbolised the first moment of Ligeti's separation from the Ligeti expressed that division with forensic detail in 1958, in an analysis of Boulez's infamous piece Structures la, one of the icons of the short-lived experiment of "total serialism" in which every aspect of music not just pitch, but volume and rhythm as well are subjected to systematic organisation. He revealed the limitations and contradictions of the technique, and the paradox that the results of total determinacy actually sound random, chaotic, and indeterminate.

"Boulez was incredibly angry after he read the article," Ligeti remembers. "He had been very nice with me when we had met before, but suddenly he did not speak to me any more. For 10 years, he was a complete enemy. I was a nobody for him. But years later, in the early 70s, he toured to Europe with his orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and played Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, and it was a pity a piece by me, my Lontano.

And it was a very bad idea, because between Beethoven Seven thinking, at that time. But it's not my way of thinking: he always makes a huge plan for his pieces. He has to have this plannification like a Soviet five-year plan. Nobody in Hungarian culture would think in this way." Ironically, in escaping political doctrines, he found himself snared by a musical ideology. Instinctively, Ligeti reacted against what he saw as this narrow, limiting approach to composition.

His response, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was a series of pieces that broke the mould of the serialism that was then the lingua franca of the avant-garde. Developed from a compositional technique discovered by Arnold Schoenberg in the early 1920s, serialism allowed composers systematically to organise musical pitch, to create a coherent musical language without having to resort to the old tonal idioms. Ligeti was never sympathetic to this kind of systemisation, and the dense soundscapes of his Atmospheres and Apparitions use the orchestra as a single, massive instrument, and create a weird sense of musical subsidence with their string glissandos and dense, chromatic clusters. "I remember listening to the first broadcast of these pieces," says Richard Steinitz, Ligeti's most recent.