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Ligeti was born in Dicsöszentmárton (now Târnaveni ) and received his initial musical training in the conservatory at Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca), both in Transylvania in Romania. His education was interrupted in 1943 when, as a Jew, he was forced by the Nazi Party to do manual work. At the same time his parents, brother, and other relatives were deported to the Auschwitz concentration campAuschwitz is the name used for a group of concentration camps, derived from the Germanized form of the nearby Polish town of Oswiecim, situated about 60 km southwest of Krakow. Beginning in 1940, Nazi Germany built several concentration camps and an exter; only his mother survived.
Following the war, Ligeti returned to his studies in BudapestSee Budapest (band) for the british melancholic post-grunge band. Danube in foreground, looking south from Margit Bridge Budapest (pronounced BOO-dah-pesht, X-SAMPA: /budapESt/), the capital city of Hungary and the country's principal political, industria, graduating in 1949. He was a student of Pál Kadosa , Ferenc Farkas , Zoltán Kodály and Sándor Veress . He went on to do ethnomusicologicalEthnomusicology is the study of music in its cultural context, cultural musicology. It can be considered the anthropology or ethnography of music. Jeff Todd Titon has called it the study of "people making music". It is often thought of as a study of non-W work on Romanian folk musicFolk music in the original sense of the term, is music by and of the people. Folk music arose, and best survives, in societies not yet affected by mass communication and the commercialization of culture. It normally was shared and performed by the entire, but after a year returned to his old school in Budapest, this time as a teacher of harmonyThis article is about musical harmony. For other uses of the term, see Harmony (disambiguation) . Harmony is the art of using pitch simultaneity (or chords, actual or implied) in music. It is sometimes referred to as the "vertical" aspect of music, with m, counterpointCounterpoint is a musical device where two or more melodic phrases occur simultaneously. The term comes from the Latin punctus contra punctum (note against note). A note moves against another note when the interval between those two notes either grows or and musical analysisMusical analysis can be defined as a process attempting to answer the question "how does this music work?". The method employed to answer this question, and indeed exactly what is meant by the question, differs from analyst to analyst. According to Ian Be. However, communications between Hungary and the west had been cut off by the then communist government, and Ligeti had to secretly listen to radio broadcasts to keep abreast of musical developments. In December of 1956, two months after the Hungarian uprising was put down by the Soviet Army, he fled to Vienna and eventually took Austrian citizenship.
There, he was able to meet several key avant garde figures from whom he had been cut off from in Hungary. These included the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig , both then working on groundbreaking electronic music. Ligeti worked in the same Cologne studio as them, and he was inspired by the sounds he was able to create there. However, he produced little electronic music of his own, instead concentrating on instrumental works which often contain electronic-sounding textures.
From this time, Ligeti's work became better known and respected, and his best known work might be said to span the period from Apparitions (1958-9) to Lontano (1967), although his later opera, Le Grand Macabre (1978) is also fairly well known. In more recent years, his three books of piano Études have become quite well known thanks to recordings of them made by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Federik Ullén , and others.
Ligeti took a post teaching in Hamburg in 1973, a job he left in 1989. From the 1980s, he has suffered ill health, which has slowed down his compositional output, though he continues to write.