Lukas Ligeti

Lukas Ligeti’s highly innovative music draw on diverse traditions including New York experimentalism, electronic music, jazz, African influences, and the European avant-garde. His music shows an interest in musical processes, complex polymetric structures and intercultural collaboration, with many of his works arising out of his deep, long-term engagement with the music of Africa. An established percussionist, especially in the fields of jazz and free improvisation, Lukas Ligeti has long worked with live electronics and has initiated numerous intercultural musical projects, such as his European-African electronica group Burkina Electric.

As a composer, Lukas Ligeti’s output ranges from percussion works, including Pattern Transformation for four marimba players, and ensemble works such as Surroundedness to his large-scale Suite for Burkina Electric and Orchestra, which the composer premiered with the MDR Symphony Orchestra in Leipzig and which has since been performed by the Brussels Philharmonic, the Gürzenich Orchestra, the Basel Sinfonietta, the Mzansi National Philharmonic Orchestra and the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. He has received commissions from the Vienna Festwochen, Austrian Radio, Bang on a Can, the NOW! festival, Philharmonie Essen, Tonhalle Düsseldorf, the Moers Festival, the American Composers Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, the Sextet Eighth Blackbird and the Kronos Quartet; his works have been premiered by soloists including Håkan Hardenberger, Colin Currie, Ji Hye Jung or Nicolas Namoradze. He gives solo concerts on electronic percussion worldwide. Lukas Ligeti was artist-in-residence at Sonoscopia in Porto and at the POLIN Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw; a CD recording of the work realised there, That Which Has Remained... That Which Will Emerge..., was released by col legno. 

A whole series of works have been premiered in recent seasons in Belgium, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Czechia, Japan and the USA. In 2024, the Accademia Chigiana in Siena presented a portrait concert with composed and improvised piece. 

As artistic director of the World New Music Days, which took place on the African continent for the first time in 2023 to mark the 100th anniversary of the International Society for New Music, Lukas Ligeti presented a festival in South Africa that offered unique opportunities for creative exchange. Prior to this, he also co-curated the programme of the highly acclaimed Oluzayo festival as part of the African Futures conference in Cologne. As part of these events, his Suite for Burkina Electric and Orchestra received three (partly country premiere) performances in Cologne, Johannesburg, Cape Town and, with the Basel Sinfonietta, in Basel in May 2024.

Lukas Ligeti studied composition and percussion at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, where his tutors included Erich Urbanner and Kurt Schwertsik. He also studied with George Crumb, Jonathan Harvey, and John Zorn, among others. In 1998, he moved to the USA; after many years in New York, he was Professor of Composition, Improvisation, and Technology at the University of California, Irvine until 2021. He currently divides his time between Miami and South Africa, where he received his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) in 2020 and holds an honorary professorship at the University of Pretoria. Since September 2024, Lukas Ligeti is Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, including the CalArts Alpert Award in Music (2010) and the Förderpreis of the City of Vienna (1990). 

2025/26 season

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