Few composers are so attuned to their audience's concentration threshold.
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. Until Ligeti arrived in the West, his published works consisted primarily of folksong arrangements and music based on Romanian or Hungarian folk music. Political repression and censorship had restricted his access to new musical ideas and his ability to publish or share his more experimental works. His arrival in Vienna late in 1956 led to his introduction to key figures in avant-garde of Western European music, notably Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig and Herbert Eimert.