I wanted a new kind of musical color,” he said in an interview. I call it micropolyphony because you cannot hear the individual voices. I wanted to develop a very thick polyphonic web. “I was not interested in serial music, in rows. ![]() But in the long term, he wanted to make his own music and he wanted to compose something radically new. Like Bartók and Kodály, he also returned to Transylvania and collected Hungarian folk music. Among others Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály had influenced the works of the young Ligeti. Only he and his mother survived, and they soon moved to Budapest so that György could study at the Liszt Academy. Much of his family died in concentration camps during WWII. (Proving his talent for languages later in the 1960s he even learned Swedish and also English in the 1970s.). At school he studied in Romanian, German and French, which later became a great asset. Three years later, György was born in Dicsőszentmárton and he was six when the family moved to Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca. After the Treaty of Trianon – when Transylvania became part of Romania – unlike many other employees of the bank, though they did not speak Romanian. But who was the man behind its memorable, atmospheric music? György Ligeti’s parents were Hungarian Jews from Budapest, who moved to Dicsőszentmárton (Romanian: Târnăven) in Transylvania – where his father found a job in a bank – during WWI, shortly after their wedding. So that’s the background story to the soundtrack of one of the (if not the most) important Sci-Fi movies. Despite their earlier dispute, Ligeti’s music was later featured in other Kubrik movies such as Shine, and Eyes Wide Shut. In the 1960s, Ligeti was unwilling to write soundtracks for movies, thinking it derogatory for a “real composer,” but his financial problems were solved by Hollywood. Additionally, royalty from the soundtrack’s sales also began pouring in. In the meantime, the movie became a blockbuster worldwide, and as a result, Ligeti’s work received significant publicity as well. He received $3,500 altogether, and even this amount was taken mostly by Ligeti’s publishers. Obviously, he continued the litigation and six years later MGM finally paid him but not much. The first arrogant reaction he received was that he ought to be grateful to have his music promoted this way. He sued the film’s distributor, MGM for using his music without permission. Later he went back to see it a second time with a stopwatch, and found out that more than half an hour of his music, including excerpts from his “Requiem,” appeared on the soundtrack. The only problem was that nobody had asked him for permission. But Ligeti didn’t know anything about it, so he went to the Vienna opening and realized that, among other works, a lot of his music was used for the film. In 1968, when Ligeti had already been living in Vienna for more than a decade, a friend wrote to him from New York to congratulate him for having his music in a very important new Hollywood movie. But why did he do that? German movie poster The interesting thing is that Ligeti was not happy about it at all. Stanley Kubrik used his composition in his iconic movie, 2001 Space Odyssey. You may not recognized immediately this composer’s name, but you’ve probably heard his music. The longer the journey goes, the more strange the board computer behaves and slowly but surely becomes a threat to the entire crew.Transylvanian-born György Ligeti. The board computer HAL 9000 is located on the spaceship Discovery, which is to investigate the phenomenon. The monolith is of unknown origin and material, but sends its signal towards Jupiter. They are on their way to Jupiter after a monolith has been excavated on the moon. The sci-fi film “2001: Odyssey in Space” deals with the astronauts Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Bowman (Keir Dullea). Timestamp: 1:24 | Scene: Song can be heard during the break. Timestamp: 0:49 | Scene: Song can always be heard when the stone (monolith) can be seen in the movie. Timestamp: 0:49 | Scene: Everybody goes into the pit and touches the stone. ![]() Timestamp: 0:19 | Scene: The satellite glides through space. Timestamp: 0:03 | Scene: The opening credits. Also Sprach Zarathustra - Richard Strauss
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