Lukas Ligeti's music unites a wide variety of musical inspirations and traditions, including the European avant-garde, African influences, jazz, and the spirit of New York’s experimental music scene. In so doing, he explores musical processes, complex polymetric structures, and possibilities of intercultural collaboration—many of his works are rooted in his deep engagement with the music of Africa. In demand as a drummer in the field of creative music, Lukas Ligeti has long worked with live electronics and has initiated numerous intercultural music projects. In 2023, he served as the artistic director of the first World New Music Days of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) to take place on the African continent.

The two concerts presented on the occasion of his 60th birthday highlight the wide-ranging spectrum of the composer and musician Lukas Ligeti, spanning the entire range from composition to improvisation. (Pressetext)

Lukas Ligeti is an Austrian/American composer and improvisor (drums and electronics) based between the US and South Africa. A recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Music, he served on the faculty of the University of California, Irvine and is currently an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria. He co-founded the groups Beta Foly (Côte d’Ivoire) and Burkina Electric (Burkina Faso), receives commissions from many of the world’s leading new music ensembles, and performs at festivals worldwide. (Pressetext)

The composer and drummer/electronic percussionist/improvisor Lukas Ligeti has forged a fiercely independent path at the cutting edge of new music, creating strikingly innovative work cognizant of a multitude of traditions yet 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 builds strongly on concepts from various music traditions from around the world, especially from Africa. Often characterized by complex polymetric structures, his music ranges from the through-composed to the free-improvised. He is deeply engaged in the field of "experimental intercultural collaboration", a phrase he has coined. Born in Austria, he lived mainly in New York City from 1998 until 2015 and subsequently in Southern California, where he served as faculty member of the PhD program "Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology" at the University of California, Irvine. After a time as Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria, he is currently Professor of Composition at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. (Pressetext)