György Ligeti

Born in Romania in 1923, Ligeti spent his early career stifled by the Hungarian Communist authorities, who demanded music he had no interest in writing. He fled to Austria in 1956 and finally had room to work. After a stint with electronic music in Cologne, he hit his stride with Atmosphères in 1961, an orchestral piece built from what he called micropolyphony - dense clouds of sound where individual lines dissolve into texture. Le Grand Macabre, his "anti-anti-opera," came in the late seventies; after that he moved toward intricate polyrhythm. He taught composition in Hamburg from 1973 to 1989, shaping a generation of composers. He died in Vienna in 2006.