The dense, floating choral sound that films use for the terrifying unknown comes from a man who survived a forced labor brigade in 1944 while his brother was murdered at Mauthausen and his parents were sent to Auschwitz. Born in 1923 in Transylvania to a Hungarian Jewish family, Gyorgy Ligeti first grasped that sound systems could be constructed when he heard local police speaking Romanian as a child. This episode traces how the Holocaust shattered his faith in traditional harmony and pushed him toward ethnomusicology and folk research after graduating from the Franz Liszt Academy in 1949.

We follow his double life under Soviet censorship, writing bottom-drawer works like Musica ricercata, whose first movement uses only the note A, and his dangerous escape to Vienna in December 1956 after the crushed Hungarian uprising. We cover his encount ...