Györgi Ligeti

György Ligeti is dead. He's probably most famous for writing some of the music Kubrick used (without permission) in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but you should hear more of him. He was a spectacular composer, for my money one of the five most important composers of the 20th century, and you should all run to the stores and buy the Ligeti complete piano works right now, and listen to his etudes, because they rock.

Here's a blog post with some lovely full mp3s of his work (including two of the etudes), and here is a retrospective with a lot of clips.