born May 28, 1923, Diciosânmartin, Transylvania, Rom.
Hungarian (Transylvanian) composer.
By 1950 he was teaching at the Budapest Academy, but not until he met Karlheinz Stockhausen and others in Vienna in 1956 did he find his compositional path. After a brief interest in electronic music, he gained international recognition for his avant-garde pieces for performers; these works dealt principally with shifting masses of sound and tone colours. His most famous work, Atmosphères (1961), was used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The opera Le Grand macabre (1978) has been widely performed in Europe.