The dense, floating choral sound that films use for the terrifying unknown comes from a man who survived a forced labor brigade in 1944 while his brother was murdered at Mauthausen and his parents were sent to Auschwitz. Born in 1923 in Transylvania to a Hungarian Jewish family, Gyorgy Ligeti first grasped that sound systems could be constructed when he heard local police speaking Romanian as a child. This episode traces how the Holocaust shattered his faith in traditional harmony and pushed him toward ethnomusicology and folk research after graduating from the Franz Liszt Academy in 1949.

We follow his double life under Soviet censorship, writing bottom-drawer works like Musica ricercata, whose first movement uses only the note A, and his dangerous escape to Vienna in December 1956 after the crushed Hungarian uprising. We cover his encounter with Stockhausen in Cologne, the invention of micropolyphony and Atmospheres in 1961, Stanley Kubrick’s unauthorized use of his music in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the lawsuit that became mutual respect, his rhythmic reinvention through Mandelbrot fractals, Banda Linda polyrhythms, and Conlon Nancarrow, his anti-anti-opera Le Grand Macabre, and his eighteen piano etudes.

• Why Soviet authorities banned a wind quintet movement for its dangerous intervals
• How a murmuration of starlings explains micropolyphony
• Why he walked away from the Cologne avant-garde and refused to be important
• The music Kubrick later licensed properly for The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut
• His death in Vienna in 2006, his son Lukas, and his student Unsuk Chin