bio
Drawing upon influences including Downtown New York experimentalism, contemporary composition, jazz, and traditional music from Africa, Lukas Ligeti has developed a unique voice as a composer and improvisor.
He studied composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria, his city of birth. He moved to the US in the mid-1990s and lived in New York City until joining the faculty of the University of California, Irvine, where he taught in the PhD program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology, followed by three years as an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria. He has also taught at the University of Ghana, lecturing in collaboration with the eminent composer/musicologist J.H. Kwabena Nketia, and has a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he was previously composer-in-residence. He currently lives in Miami and Johannesburg.
Among other prizes and grants, Lukas received the CalArts Alpert Award in Music in 2010. His music is featured on CDs on col legno, Tzadik, Cantaloupe, Intuition, Staubgold, Innova, Leo, and other record labels, and he is an endorser of Vic Firth drumsticks.
With performances at major venues and festivals worldwide, his compositions have been commissioned by Ars Musica (Brussels), the Aris and Ligeti Quartets, Moers Festival, Bang on a Can, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Ensemble Modern, the American Composers Orchestra, MDR Orchestra (Germany), Håkan Hardenberger and Colin Currie, the Vienna Festwochen, Radio France, and choreographer Karole Armitage. He created a sound installation for the Goethe Institute on the occasion of the 2014 Soccer World Cup in Brazil, has participated in two projects of Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui through the Sharjah Art Foundation, and was artist-in-residence at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland; Sonoscopia in Porto, Portugal; and the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy.
As a drummer, he has worked with John Zorn, Marilyn Crispell, Gary Lucas, John Tchicai, Henry Kaiser, Michael Manring, Don Preston, Elliott Sharp, Raoul Björkenheim, and others, and leads or co-leads several bands such as Hypercolor (with Eyal Maoz and James Ilgenfritz) and Notebook. He has given solo electronic percussion concerts on six continents, performing on the Marimba Lumina, an instrument designed by seminal synthesizer engineer Don Buchla for which he has composed a wide-ranging repertoire.
Engaged in experimental intercultural collaboration in Africa for 30 years, he co-founded the ensemble Beta Foly in Côte d’Ivoire and today co-leads Burkina Electric, the first electronica band from Burkina Faso. He has also worked in Egypt (with Nubian musicians and musicians of the Cairo Opera Orchestra), Uganda (with that country’s premier music/dance group, the Ndere Troupe), Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, etc.
In 2023, he was the artistic director of the International Society for Contemporary Music’s centenary World New Music Days in South Africa, the first time the festival took place on the African continent.