From his youth, György Ligeti was attracted by the idea of composing a requiem. In spite of the fact that by setting the text of the mass for the dead to music Ligeti was continuing a tradition that goes back centuries, his work is far from traditional, and not remotely related to previous specimens of the genre. One of the most noticeable peculiarities of Ligeti’s setting is that it does not contain the complete text of the requiem; only the Introitus, the Kyrie and the Sequence. The other is that in Ligeti’s Requiem the liturgical text is only latently present, as if hidden beneath the surface of the work. The emphasis is not on the meaning or affective contents of the text, but on the sound of it, together with all its sensual ’physical’ properties – colour, thickness, massiveness, and density. Apparitions was Ligeti’s first instrumental work following his emigration to the West, and also the first work to gain him significant international recognition. His in-depth work in the electronic medium is palpable in Apparitions for large orchestra too: the traditional ’building blocks’ of music, melody, rhythm and harmony, have disappeared; their place is taken by pure ’sounds’. The composer matches these one to the other piece by piece – similarly to the way in electronic music he spliced pieces of magnetic tape together. If there is one compositional technique that preoccupied György Ligeti throughout almost his whole life, in his most varied stylistic periods, then it is polyphony. San Francisco Polyphony was the last stage on the path towards a more transparent, more contoured ’new polyphony’. The title of this one-movement piece refers partly to the compositional technique (Polyphony) and partly to the venue of the world premiere (San Francisco). The piece was written for the sixtieth anniversary of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and was premiered in January 1975 conducted by Seiji Ozawa.