Success Quote by Gyorgy Ligeti

Calling New York a "dream world" is an outsider's power move: it turns a real city into a projection screen. For Gyorgy Ligeti, a Hungarian composer who escaped postwar Europe and built a career in the West, the phrase carries the charge of arrival. New York isn’t just a place; it’s a myth engineered by records, radio, and reputation. You can hear the immigrant awe, but also the strategic simplification. A city so noisy and contradictory gets flattened into an emblem because emblems travel better than details.

The second half sharpens the intent: "the center of jazz and rock". Ligeti isn’t staking a claim as a jazz commentator; he’s signaling where cultural legitimacy has migrated. For a modernist composer associated with high-art institutions, invoking jazz and rock is a way of acknowledging the century’s real engine of innovation: rhythm, timbre, amplification, the social life of music. The subtext is competitive as much as admiring. If New York is the center, then European concert music is no longer the unquestioned capital of modernity; it has to negotiate with popular forms that generate their own avant-gardes.

The line also works as a small act of self-positioning. Ligeti’s music obsesses over texture, pulse, and sonic mass; jazz and rock offer a vernacular vocabulary for those preoccupations without dragging in academic pedigree. "Dream world" gives him permission to be both seduced and skeptical: New York as promised land, and New York as glamorous hallucination that artists willingly enter, because the illusion itself can be productive.