I can’t believe György Ligeti has been dead for eight years already. An avant-garde composer whose music could actually inspire affection, Ligeti rocketed to broader fame when his music was used, against his will, in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Ligeti was born in Transylvania in 1923. He survived many hardships. Most of his family was wiped out in the Holocaust; he was conscripted into a forced labor brigade; he lived for a time under strict communist rule. He survived the violent Soviet putdown of the Hungarian Revolution, and finally escaped with his on-again/off-again wife in a pair of mail sacks, leaping off a night train and crawling for miles through the mud to find safety in Vienna. He went on to become one of the leading composers of the second half of the 20th century.

Ligeti was not the kind of artist who would have flourished under totalitarianism. (Come to think of it, what artist is?) He even abandoned the avant-garde circle in Cologne, which included Karlheinz Stockhausen, because he found the environment to be too dogmatic. Though he wrote little electronic music himself, he incorporated the lessons he learned at the Cologne Electronic Music Studio into his instrumental works, often creating otherworldly textures.

Remarkably, for all he endured, he was able to hang on to his sense of humor, and this shone through in his music from time to time.

Here’s the car horn prelude to his opera, “Le Grand Macabre.”

And perhaps his greatest hit (thanks to Kubrick), his “Requiem,” most recently heard in the trailers for “Godzilla.”

Lastly, Barbara Hannigan in “Mysteries of the Macabre,” a distillation of three coloratura arias from “Le Grand Macabre,” sung by the character of Gepopo, the chief of secret police. In case you’re curious, the text is semi-nonsense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFFpzip-SZk

Happy birthday, György Ligeti!