Musica Ricercata (1951-53)

This is a seminal suite of minimalist pieces aren't actually that hard. There are lovely echoes of Bartok in a few. I'm a fan of Ligeti, but this music is very approachable anyway. Most of them can be assigned to an intermediate student.

This suite of short pieces is a gem. moving from lively and humorous to poignant and grieving. This makes me both laugh and cry. The movement that is in memory of Bartok is incredible. The biggest challenge in the suite is movement where left and right hands play independently of...

one another. Buy this, you won't regret it.

A favorite of me (49 years, 30 years piano)and my son (16, 5 years piano). Although I bet, his preference for the second piece in this set is based on the fact that it is the background music for the famous sex scene in Kubrick´s "Eyes Wide Shut...

"! The entire set provides a variety of styles and techniques. Amongst them a rather difficult piece of minimal music with a repetitive pattern for the left hand and a rhythmically disconnected simple melodical pattern for the right, a piece straight out of Bartok and some very Ligeti-only music. In fact I think the minimal music item is worth the entire volume. And when I play it people usually get attentive. They like it very much.

This work is a very good introduction to Ligeti's piano works. It is much easier than the phenomenonally difficult etudes, but is still not easy. It offers some very interesting ideas. For example, there are eleven pieces in the set. The first is built upon only two tones (transposed...

through octaves) the second has only three, the third four, and so on until the last piece is a chromatic piec in a contrapuntal style. There are very aggressive rhythms and various degrees of feeling. have fun in the tenth piece when the player is instructed to play huge chord clusters "as if mad". If you don't really like modern music, I'll bet you'll like this one.