Marcel Antonisse / Anefo · CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

György Ligeti spent his early career restricted by the cultural authorities of Communist Hungary, and only after escaping to the West in 1956 could he fully pursue the avant-garde techniques he'd been developing in his head. In Cologne he experimented with electronic music before his breakthrough orchestral works, including Atmosphères, built on a dense layered technique he called micropolyphony. He never wrote a film score directly, but excerpts of his music became inseparable from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, introducing his sound to an audience far larger than the concert hall. He taught composition in Hamburg from 1973 to 1989.