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.
ONE-PAGE 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.
Lukas Ligeti studied composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria, his city of birth. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and subsequently lived in New York City from 1998 until 2015. After serving for several years on the faculty of the University of California, Irvine, where he taught in the PhD program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology, he is currently 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 lives in Miami and Johannesburg.
Lukas received the CalArts Alpert Award in Music in 2010. He has also been awarded two Composition Fellowships by the New York Foundation for the Arts and two yearlong Austrian State Grants in composition, among other awards. His music is featured on CDs on col legno, Tzadik, Cantaloupe, Intuition, 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 among others by 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. His music has also been performed by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lyon, Tonkünstler Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Liverpool Philharmonic Ensemble 10/10, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, etc. 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, and was artist-in-residence at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, where he created a site-specific performance. In 2019, he was artist-in-residence in Porto, Portugal, where he created a work for improvising musicians and an electro-mechanical, robotic sound sculpture developed by the association Sonoscopia.
As a drummer, he has worked with John Zorn, Marilyn Crispell, Gary Lucas, John Tchicai, Henry Kaiser, Michael Manring, Wadada Leo Smith, DJ Spooky, Elliott Sharp, members of Sonic Youth and the Grateful Dead, etc., 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 five 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 25 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 engaged in collaborations and/or led projects in Egypt (with Nubian musicians and musicians of the Cairo Opera Orchestra), Uganda (with that country’s premier music/dance group, the Ndere Troupe), Kenya, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, etc.