Atmosphères is an orchestral work of about eight to nine minutes by György Ligeti, first performed at the Donaueschingen Festival in 1961 and dedicated to the memory of the composer Mátyás Seiber. It sets aside melody, harmony and pulse in the usual sense: the string players each have an individual part, and the dense web of lines, varied in tiny increments, fuses into slowly shifting clouds of sound, a technique Ligeti called micropolyphony.
Stanley Kubrick used the piece, without the composer’s permission, in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where it is heard more than once and most memorably in the Star Gate sequence; the dispute over the use of Ligeti’s music was later settled out of court with financial compensation. Through the film, an uncompromising piece of new orchestral music reached a mass audience. For drone listeners it is a key ancestor, showing an entire orchestra behaving like a single sustained, breathing mass.