Lukas Ligeti

Biography

Lukas Ligeti (born in Vienna, Austria, 13 June 1965) is an Austrian composer and percussionist. His work incorporates elements of jazz, contemporary classical and various world musics, especially African traditional and popular music styles.

Biography

Ligeti is of Hungarian ancestry (although he never learned to speak the Hungarian language fluently, since his parents spoke Hungarian to one another but spoke German to him while he was growing up) and is the son of the noted composer György Ligeti (1923–2006). He was born without citizenship, due to being the child of Jewish parents who had fled from Hungary.
He attended the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, where he studied composition with Erich Urbanner, Kurt Schwertsik, Heinrich Gattermeyer, and Dieter Kaufmann; as well as jazz drums with Fritz Ozmec, earning a Diploma (with "unanimous distinction") in 1993 and an M.A. (with highest grade) in 1997. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2020.
Ligeti has done numerous cross-cultural collaborations and exchanges with non-Western musicians, experimenting with both ancient African traditional instruments and modern music technology.
He travels frequently to Africa and has performed with musicians from Côte d'Ivoire (where he founded the experimental intercultural group Beta Foly), Egypt (with musicians from Nubia and the Orchestra of the Cairo Opera House), Zimbabwe (with Batonka musicians), Uganda (with Ndere Troupe), Kenya, South Africa, Lesotho (with lesiba performers), Mozambique and several other African nations.
His group, Burkina Electric, based in Burkina Faso, brings together electronica and Burkinabe popular music.
From 1994 to 1996 he was visiting composer at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University.
In 2006 he was visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. In 2008 he was a guest professor at the University of Ghana, where he collaborated with composer and musicologist J.H. Kwabena Nketia.
From 2015 to 2021 he was a member of the faculty of the Department of Music at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught in the Ph.D. program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology (ICIT). He later taught at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and joined the faculty of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels as Professor of Composition in 2024.

Recognitions and awards

Ligeti was recipient of the CalArts Herb Alpert Arts Award in the Music category in 2010.
Ligeti is a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Composition Fellowship (2002, 2008), of the Austrian State Grant for Composition (1991, 1996), and was awarded the “Förderungspreis” of the City of Vienna in 1990, a 1993 award of the Republic of Austria and composition fellowships and grants by the Arts Council of Santa Clara County/California and the Austrian state.
In 2013 and 2015–19, he has been listed as a “Rising Star” percussionist in the Critics’ Poll of the leading jazz magazine DownBeat; he was also the winner of the NYC-based “UnCaged Toy Piano” composition competition in 2013.
Residencies have included Villa Montalvo (Saratoga, California), the Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice, Italy), Acéfalo Festival (Santiago, Chile) and Sonoscopia (Porto, Portugal).

Personal life

Ligeti lived for 30 years in the United States (in the Bay Area of California from 1994 to 1996; in New York City from 1998 to 2015; in Irvine, California from 2015 to 2021; in and Miami in 2021). He later lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has been based in Brussels, Belgium since September 2024. He has stated that both of his parents came from Jewish families that had been assimilated into Hungarian culture, and that he grew up without "any kind of Jewish culture or religion."

Discography (selected)

1991: Things Of Now Now – Nownowism
1993: Kombinat M – Hybrid Beat
1997: Lukas Ligeti & Beta Foly – Lukas Ligeti & Beta Foly
2003: Raoul Björkenheim & Lukas Ligeti – Shadowglow
2004: Lukas Ligeti – Mystery System
2008: Lukas Ligeti – Afrikan Machinery
2010: Burkina Electric – Paspanga
2011: Lukas Ligeti, Benoît Delbecq, Gianni Gebbia, Aly Keita & Michael Manring – Pattern Time
2014: Lukas Ligeti & Thollem McDonas – Imaginary Images
2015: Hypercolor – Hypercolor
2021: Lukas Ligeti - That Which Has Remained... That Which Will Emerge...
2026: Lukas Ligeti - Notebook