Few composers are so attuned to their audience's concentration threshold.
His varied output, which he began in pre-communist Hungary and continued in western Europe after the Hungarian communist revolution, is searingly intense at times and full of vivacity, humor and irony at others. Sony Classical features Ligeti's music in the award-winning Ligeti Edition, a series of recordings supervised by the composer. He spent a year doing field research in Romanian folk music after his graduation in 1949 but returned to the Liszt Academy in 1950 as a teacher of harmony, counterpoint and formal analysis. He remained there until he fled from Hungary after the revolution in 1956. Before Ligeti emigrated to the West, his work was limited by political repression and censorship, which restricted access to new musical ideas and discouraged public presentation of experimental music.