Lukas Ligeti

The composer and drummer/electronic percussionist Lukas Ligeti has made pioneering contributions to new music in the areas of intercultural composition, polymetric structures, ensemble interplay, and the integration od composition and improvisation. His strikingly original work is cognizant of a multitude of traditions while belonging to none of contemporary music’s known streams or groupings. At the intersection of contemporary composition, Downtown New York experimentalism, jazz, and electronics, his work build strongly on concepts from various music traditions from around the world, especially from Africa. He is deeply engaged in the field of “experimental intercultural collaboration”, a phrase he has coined.
Born in Austria, hie lived mainly in New York City from 1998 until 2015 and then relocated to Southern California, where he was a core faculty member of PhD program “Integradet Composition, Improvisation and Technology” at the University of California, Irvine. He was then an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria and is currently Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles, dividing his time between Burssels, Miami and Johannesburg.  

After taking up percussion at the age of 18, Lukas studied composition (with Erich Urbanner, Kurt Schwertsik, Heinrich Gattermeyer, and Dieter Kaufmann) and jazz drums (with Fritz Ozmec) at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, obtaining a Diploma (with “unanimous distinction”, 1993) and a MA (with highest grade, 1997). He also holds a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand (2020). From 1994 until 1996, he was a visiting scholar at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. At various workshops, summer courses, and in other semiformal situations, he also studied with George Crumb, Jonathan Harvey, David Moss, Michel Waisvisz, and John Zorn, among others. He was composer-in-residence at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2006, and has also taught composition at the University of Ghana, lecturing jointly with the eminent composer-ethnomusicologist J. H. Kwabena Nketia.

Among his awards is, most notably, the California Institute of the Arts Herb Alpert Award in Music (2010); he is a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Composition Fellowship (2002, 2008) and of the Austrian State Grant for Composition (1991, 1996), and was awarded the “Förderungspreis” of the City of Vienna in 1990. In 2013 and yearly 2015-19, he was shortlisted 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, CA) the Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice, Italy), the POLIN Musieum of the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw, Poland), the Acéfalo Festival (Valparaíso, Chile), and Sonoscopia (Porto, Portugal) .

Lukas’ compositions have been commissioned and/or premiered by the Vienna Festwochen, Ars Musica (Brussels), Mitteldeutsches Radio-Sinfonieorchester, American Composers Orchestra (a concerto featuring himself as improvising soloist on electronic marimba, premiered at Carnegie Hall), Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich, Bang On A Can, Ensemble Modern, Eighth Blackbird, Amadinda Percussion Group, Opera Nova (Prague State Opera), Austrian National Radio, Ensemble “die reihe” (Vienna), the Kronos, Aris, Del Sol and Ligeti String Quartets, New York University/Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Subtropics Festival (Miami), Historical Museum of Southern Florida, Ensemble Reconsil (Vienna), Network for New Music (Philadelphia), Sofia Gantois/Ensemble Hopper (Liège), Costellazione K (Italy), Icebreaker (UK), Colin Currie and Håkan Hardenberger/Borletti Buitoni Trust, Budapest Music Center, Radio France, Performa Biennial, Kanazawa Experimental Music Festival, the Austrian Cultural Forum NYC, Rebekah Heller, Kathleen Supové, Phyllis Chen, Jennifer Hymer, Ben Reimer and David Cossin, a consortium of 16 marimba soloists including Eric Cha-Beach and Ji Hye Jung, and many others. "Ligeti in Dialogue", his collaboration with pianist Nicolas Namoradze, was premiered in Budapest in 2023.

His music has also been performed by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Gürzenic Orchestra Cologne, Orchestre National de Lyon, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Basel Sinfonietta, Mzansi National Philharmonic Orchestra, Cape Town Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta, Avanti! (Finland), Ensemble 10/10 (Liverpool Philharmonic), Contemporaneous, Ensemble mise-en, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the London Composers Ensemble, Laboratorio Novamusica (Venice), Vienna Saxophone Quartet, the Prometeo, Kamus, Koehne and Flux String Quartets, the Sandbox, Kroumata, Synergy, Third Coast, and So Percussion Groups, violinists Darragh Morgan and Lara St.John, trombonist David Taylor, and pianists Ben Schoeman, Jay Gottlieb, Mary Dullea, Mark Gasser, Jai Jeffryes, and Imri Talgam, among others.

He has been commissioned by choreographers (Karole Armitage, Susan Quinn, Panaibra Gabriel Canda, Bettina Essaka), composed film scores (commissioned by the European TV channel ARTE), and created music for installations (such as a surround sound piece on the occasion of the 2014 Soccer World Cup in Brazil, commissioned by the Goethe Institute Rio de Janeiro).

As a drummer, he co-leads several bands including Burkina Electric, the first electronica group from Burkina Faso in West Africa, the innovative jazz trio Hypercolor (with Eyal Maoz and James Ilgenfritz), and his ensemble Notebook, integrating new techniques of composition and improvisation. He has performed at the Montréal, Rochester, Angel City (Los Angeles), Mulhouse, Vicenza, and Tampere Jazz Festivals, the Opéra de Monte Carlo, High Zero (Baltimore), Angelica Festival (Italy), Wien Modern (Austria), Luminato Festival (Toronto), Salihara Festival (Jakarta), World Music Meeting (Netherlands), Sauti za Busara (Zanzibar), the Sharjah Biennial (UAE), etc., and has recorded and/or performed with musicians such as John Zorn, Henry Kaiser, Raoul Björkenheim, Elliott Sharp, Robert Dick, Gary Lucas, Frisk Frugt, Tarek Atoui, “Pyrolator” Kurt Dahlke, Rupert Huber, Marilyn Crispell, John Tchicai, Uchihashi Kazuhisa, Fred Frith, Esther Flückiger, Walter Prati, Adachi Tomomi, Luc Houtkamp, Jonathan Crossley, David Kollar, Bill Laswell, Carlo Mombelli, Bella Adamova, Jon Rose, Paul Dutton, Michael Snow, John Oswald, Casey Sokol, Arrington de Dionyso, Pamelia Stickney, Wadada Leo Smith, Borah Bergman, Butch Morris, Miya Masaoka, George Lewis, Yedda Lin, Mpho Molikeng, Thollem McDonas, Benoît Delbecq, Gianni Gebbia, Susie Ibarra, Stefan Poetzsch, Frank Gratkowski, Vincent Chancey, Guillermo Gregorio, Michael Manring, Aly Keïta, Marc Duby, Fritz Novotny/Reform Art Unit, David Rothenberg, Ned Rothenberg, Jonas Hellborg, Wu Fei, Khyam Allami, Maurice Louca, Jim O’Rourke, Martin Philadelphy, Eugene Chadbourne, DJ Spooky, DJ Khan, members of Sonic Youth, Wilco, the Dixie Dregs, the Grateful Dead, and many others.

He performs frequently on the marimba lumina, an electronic marimba designed by synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla, and has given solo concerts of his music for this instrument on five continents including at the London Jazz Festival, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Visiones Sonoras (Mexico), Acéfalo Festival (Chile), Kala Ghoda Festival and Carnival of e-Creativity (India), Kanazawa Experimental Music Festival (Japan), Kraak Festival (Belgium), Ligeti Festival Transylvania (Romania), Winter Nights (Israel), Irtijal Festival (Lebanon), Forum Wallis (Switzerland), Unyazi Electronic Music Festival (South Africa), etc.

He has led or co-led experimental intercultural projects since 1994, when he was commissioned by the Goethe Institute to conduct a workshop in Côte d’Ivoire; this led to founding an ensemble, Beta Foly, based in Abidjan, and much touring throughout the late 1990s. His current group Burkina Electric, based in Burkina Faso, is a long-term consequence of this work. In addition to numerous further Goethe Institute commissions, his intercultural work has also been commissioned by various African NGOs, MAPP International (NYC), and the Austrian Development Cooperation. As part of the American Composers Forum's Continental Harmony project (White House Millennium Council), he composed an extended piece for musicians from various Caribbean islands residing in Miami, Florida. He collaborated with traditional musicians in Egypt, performing at the Cairo Opera; in Uganda, he created music in collaboration with members of that country's foremost music and dance group, the Ndere Troupe. In Zimbabwe, he worked with Batonga musicians; in Lesotho, he collaborated with some of the few remaining virtuosos of the lesiba, an unusual and nearly-extinct instrument, while in Kenya he was a guest artist in the Goethe Institute's Ten Cities project, an exchange of ideas about electronic dance music.

Lukas Ligeti’s music has been released to high acclaim on three CDs on the Tzadik label as well several more on the col legno, Cantaloupe, Intuition, Leo, TUM, Wallace, and Innova labels, among others. He has curated various festivals and concerts, and was most notably the artistic director of the 2023 World New Music Days of the International Society for New Music in South Africa, that festival's centenary edition and the first time it took place on the African continent. He curated the 2007 edition of Ohren auf Europa, a festival of contemporary music at the Tonhalle in Düsseldorf, Germany; on that occasion, he was commissioned by the Tonhalle to compose a piece for the Düsseldorf-based Notabu Ensemble. He has curated a month of concerts at The Stone in NYC (2009), and the CD compilation "The Politics of Sound Art" for Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press, 2015), and was a member of the curatorial team of the Brooklyn concert venue National Sawdust.

Strongly active in the field of artistic research, articles by Lukas Ligeti have been published in academic periodicals such as the Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa, Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press) and Postamble (University of Cape Town) and in the book Arcana II, edited by John Zorn. His marimba solo work “Thinking Songs” was the subject of a dissertation by Caitlin Jones (University of South Carolina). Lukas has presented talks on various topics at conferences such as A Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts (UC Irvine), György Ligeti Symposium (Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, Finland), Pan African Society for Music and Arts Education (Mbabane, Swaziland, Victoria, Seychelles, and Cape Coast, Ghana), South African Society for Research in Music (Northwest University, Potchefstroom), Orpheus Doctoral Conference (Orpheus Trust, Ghent, Belgium), and the Working Group on African Musics of the Council of Traditional Music (University of Ghana, Legon). He was a board member of NewMusicSA, South Africa’s ISCM chapter, and has served as a thesis advisor or external examiner for the University of the Free State, University of South Africa and Northwest University in South Africa, University of Cape Coast in Ghana, the CUNY Graduate Center in the US, the University of Gent (Belgium), and as an assessor for South Africa’s National Research Foundation.

For more information, please see www.lukasligeti.com.