I am almost ready to try out Ligeti's music - I say almost, becase reading this article you come with these nuggets, all meant to warn you : DIFFICULT MUSIC HERE - ONLY SUITABLE TO MUSIC SNOBS

....They taught you retrograde inversions, pitch classes, parameters, Klangfarbenmelodie, i.e., the gamut of formal/intellectual shibboleths that were supposed to explain contemporary music......Listening to the two Adventures with enlightened ears,.......

(translated: this is music you can't listen to unless you have lots of "shibboleths", preferrably stuck in your ears)

my own Stockhausen experience: dragged by a girl I was hoping to score, had to sit thru an entire live performance; enlightened ears or not, I was ready to kill by the time it was over. My date's pathetic attempts to say something, anything nice about the crap were almost comic.

I don't listen to either Ligeti or Stockhausen every month -- probably not even every two months. But Ligeti has written some wonderful music that I recognize instantly and enjoy greatly when I hear it. Check out the album African Rhythms by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, which contrasts some of Ligeti's amazing piano etudes with music of the Aka Pygmies.

Similarly for Stockhausen, whom I may listen to even less frequently. But Stimmung (for example) is an amazing piece that I can listen to again and again. You need the right space (and enough time) to listen to it, but it has something -- real craftsmanship and imagination, together with a keen ear -- that marks it as something special. There's always been crap music, and like almost all other composers the output of Ligeti and Stockhausen may be uneven, but there's stuff there that speaks to the late 20th-century and early 21st-century ear in a way that no previous music has ever done.

thanks for the advice, and I will try some of that stuff you mention (in small doses)

>>need the right space (and enough time) to listen to it

are u saying i need to get stoned before I can listen to it? oy!

I think you misread this part of the article. When he writes:

"...They taught you retrograde inversions, pitch classes, parameters, Klangfarbenmelodie, i.e., the gamut of formal/intellectual shibboleths that were supposed to explain contemporary music..."

He was actually poking fun at the elitism of the professors at music school who teach contemporary music. Those classes are always a laundry list of esoteric terms that don't actually tell you anything about why the music is valuable and worth listening to. You don't need any of this knowledge to enjoy the music, just as you don't need to know what a "deceptive cadence" or a "false recapitulation" is to enjoy Brahms.

I hope so ... these music schools don't sound like lots of fun

as I said above, i will give Ligeti a shot.