Lukas Ligeti

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