Contact
Elke Moltrechtem@karstenwitt.com+49 30 214 594-227
General Management (except USA)
Lukas Ligeti is the artistic director of the World New Music Days, which will take place in Africa for the first time in its centenary year from 24 November to 3 December - a unique opportunity for creative exchange: both the African audience and the guests from all over the world will hear music they have never come into contact with before.
Lukas Ligeti on artistic influences and his father's legacy.
Lukas Ligeti, Suite for Burkina Electric and Orchester
Lukas Ligeti, composition
Lukas Ligeti, percussion
Burkina Electric
Basel Sinfonietta
Chloé Dufresne, conductor
Lukas Ligeti’s compositions 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, written for the Viennese ensemble “die reihe”, to his large-scale Suite for Burkina Electric and Orchestra, which the composer premiered with the MDR Symphony Orchestra in Leipzig and interpreted in a revised version with the Brussels Philharmonic in 2021. He has received commissions from the Vienna Festwochen, Austrian Radio, Bang on a Can, Tonhalle Düsseldorf, and from orchestras and ensembles including the American Composers Orchestra, the Tonkünstler Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, Eighth Blackbird, and the Kronos Quartet; his works have been premiered by soloists including Håkan Hardenberger and Colin Currie. He has been featured at festivals including the Festival d’Automne à Paris and the London Southbank Centre’s Meltdown Festival. 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 were premiered in 2022: Aquifères was launched by soloist Sofia Gantois (flute) and the Ensemble Hopper in Liège; the Ensemble Reconsile interpreted Actaonella in Vienna – the American premiere followed in February 2023 with the Ensemble New Music Network in Philadelphia. In Essen, Ensemble BRuCH together with Burkina Electric premiered Égal, pas pareil, nonpareil. Réflections sur badenya, fadenya, communauté et convivialité.
In the current season, a number of other works will be premiered: a new composition for headphone orchestra, Burkina Electric, and the Ensemble BRuCH will be heard at the Moers Festival on 26 and 29 May. A duo programme with pianist Nicolas Nomodadze will be launched at the Budapest Music Center on 27 May. The Ligeti Quartet will perform a new string quartet at the Aldeburgh Festival on 23 June and in the next season, on 1 March 2024, with Aris Quartet at the Liederhalle Stuttgart. Other works will be performed, some of them for the first time, at the Konzerthaus Freiburg, in a portrait concert at the Musikhochschule Hamburg, at the Ostrava Days in the Czech Republic, at the Culturescape Festival Basel, and in Bologna; the pianist Shoko Kawasaki has the solo piano work Trinity in her repertoire on a major recital tour with numerous stops in Japan as well as at the Gasteig in Munich, and the Amaryllis Quartet will perform the German premiere of the string quartet Moving Houses in Bremen as well as in Lübeck and Hamburg. In 2023, Lukas Ligeti will also be co-curator of the Oluzayo Festival, which will take place as part of the African Futures conference in Cologne, and artistic director of the World Music Days in Johannesburg on the occasion of the centenary of the International Society for New Music.
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. 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).
2022/23 season
This biography is to be reproduced without any changes, omissions or additions, unless expressly authorised by the artist management.
New works for orchestra include Incandescence (2017), Suite for Burkina Electric and Orchestra (2016), and Curtain (2015).
His ouevre for chamber music includes works such as Language:PROUN:music for soprano, violin, cello, trombone and vibraphone (2016), Thinking Songs for marimba (2015), Tangle for trumpet and percussion (2002) and Pattern Transformation for four players on two marimbas (1988).
Please contact us for a complete work catalogue.
“Lukas [Ligeti]'s Entasis (…) tends more to the "take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself" line in quartet music, a marvellousy organic work.”
Theartsdesk.com, Daid Nice, 26/06/2023
“Lukas has managed a pretty astonishing personal and musical feat in his creative life: he's able to acknowledge his father's influence and at the same time, sidestep it and even transcend it.”
The Guardian, Tom Service
“Modest and affable onstage, Ligeti represents, under a Clark Kent exterior, a new generation of musical Superman – a globally minded, technologically adept, technically sophisticated composer who also happens to be a virtuoso performer and accomplished improviser with a populist bent.”
LA Times, Mark Swed
“Lukas Ligeti was an energetic one-man band […] performing his own unorthodox works, which meshed West African melodies and lively rhythms in a jubilantly organized frenzy.”
New York Times, Vivien Schweitzer
“Thinking Songs (2015) [is] a fiercely virtuosic five-movement work for solo marimba. […] The composition itself took us [on] an incredible musical journey: exploiting timbral possibilities with different mallets in Dance, slow-moving lines in Lamento, technical impossibilities manifested into reality in Four-Part Invention, playful exploration of prepared marimba in Scherzo, and quasi-minimalist shifting accents in Two-Part Invention.”
New Classic LA, Cristina Lord
Lukas Ligeti - Thinkings songs
Lukas Ligeti - rezydencja artystyczna w Muzeum POLIN
Lukas Ligeti - Pattern transformation
Lukas Ligeti in Composers Now
Lukas Ligeti - Incandescence
Lukas Ligeti - Curtain
Lukas Ligeti - Surroundedness OFR
Lukas Ligeti - Tangle
Lukas Ligeti - That Which Has Remained…That Which Will Emerge, IV. Elusive Counterpoint
Lukas Ligeti - That Which Has Remained…That Which Will Emerge, V. Andenk an Betz ... in the papers, she was Polish
Col Legno, 2021, WWE 1 CD 204452
Lukas Ligeti (drums), Eyal Maoz (guitar), James Ilgenfritz (bass)
Tzadik, 2015, TZ 7811
Lukas Ligeti (drums) und Thollem McDonas (piano)
Leo Records, 2014, CD LR 709
Recording of improvisations by Lukas Ligeti (drums) and João Orecchia (electronics)
Wallace Records, Italy, 2011, wallace143
Album of improvisations by Lukas Ligeti (drums) with Benoît Delbecq (prepared piano), Gianni Gebbia (alto saxophone), Aly Keïta (balafon), and Michael Manring (electric bass)Innova Records, USA, 2011, #732
Solo album of electronic music by Lukas Ligeti, performed by Lukas LigetiTzadik Records, USA, 2008, TZ 8054
Chamber-music compositions by Lukas Ligeti
Tzadik, USA, 2004, TZ 7099