Somewhere in Europe... (ars poetica - fragments)
Somewhere in Europe - between East & West - there exists something that we occasionally use to call Mitteleuropa (German expression for Central Europe). For some, it is a "thousand years dream", for others – as Peter Handke - "...nothing more than a meteorological term...” Whatever it is – to put aside any possible political manipulations - if one travels from Vojvodina to Krakow or from Transylvania to Vienna, he will easily discern the omnipresence of the rich ethnical and cultural mixture. Over centuries different people with different backgrounds melted there one into other, creating a Middle European Babylon. Great hegemonies often played cruel games with these nations, using them for their own purposes: sometimes unified, sometimes divided them; often with tragical consequences... Frequent territorial remodeling, political struggles, and local wars made these people prudent and more and more introspective, with the only real "weapon" in their hands: their own – often mixed - cultural heritage. If any resistance failed – and that happened over and over again – those people left in a numerous epics, music and folk art, at least some trail of their previous existence.
Unfortunately, these regions were never safe from inter ethnical clashes as well, and chauvinistic euphoria. Politically manipulated, these people exchanged their peaceful coexistence for the horror of civil wars or ethnic conflicts, and sunk into the twilight zone of cruel vengeances based on ethno-religious principles. Regrettably, I witnessed the preparation and the beginning one of that madness in my ex-country, more precisely in ex-Yugoslavia, which cancelled itself in the last decade of the twentieth century.
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Novi Sad - ( Ujvid é k in Hungarian, Neusatz in German, Neoplanta was the name of the same place in the Roman Empire), is the capital of region called Vojvodina, now the north part of Serbia - back to the days of Tito's Yugoslavia when I was born, it stood as an autonomous province. During the history it was ruled by different states & hegemonies: by the Habsburgs, later on Hungarians (during the late period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire & during the Second World War) & Serbians (during the first 1918-1941, second 1945-1991 and the last 1991- 2000 Yugoslavia). Before The Second World War, the four principal nations were Serbians, Hungarians, Germans and Jews. Throughout the Second World War, Jews were almost all exterminated by German and Hungarian fascists, and at the end of the same war the Germans were partly exterminated by Serbian communists - the rest of the same population left Novi Sad before the final battles. A lot of Hungarians were severely suffered from the liberators vengeance as well - still they somehow managed to stay there in a considerable number. It so befell that the next huge exodus of Hungarians happened during the Yugoslavian civil wars in the nineties. Next to this four, one could find many other nationalities as well (Rumanians, Slovaks, Czechs, Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Turks, Albanians, Armenians...etc). Novi Sad was always one of the cultural centers in all versions of Yugoslavia and was extremely important for Serbians, when Serbia was until the Turkish domination. Then, Novi Sad belonged to the Hungarian Crown & was the cultural centre for the exiled Serbian intelligencia (for that very reason they called it the Athens of Serbia ).
As a member of a Hungarian ethnic minority, by the time, a strange and somehow uneasy feeling developed in my state of the mind: although in Tito's Yugoslavia all the human and civil rights were guaranteed for ethnic minorities, in the majority of the population, Hungarians - even if respected as a hard worker populace - were stigmatized as collaborators during the last World War and in a cryptic but evident way, treated as strangers. To raise the paradox situation, in Hungary we were regarded as Yugoslavians - despite the fact that we used our mother tongue on a daily basis and cultivated enthusiastically our native culture. In Hungary, we were mostly considered as complete strangers as well (unfortunately, nobody gets a rid of compatriots so easy as Hungarians do). Slowly but surely, I realized that I became a professional stranger, which isn't always the simplest thing to bear. This - I would say - natural state of being in between and a bit of stranger on the both side, by the time, unconsciously but evidently influenced my whole personality and my musical language as well.
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As a student I red almost everything available from writers and philosophers like Czeszlaw Milosz , Nikolai Berdjajev , Witold Gombrowicz , Emil Cioran or Josef Skvorecki - all dissidents – who, in their writings reported on different aspects of East and Middle European tragedies - so similar to each another. Then, I could not imagine something like that might happen again and again, it all seemed to me like an ancient history... Disappointingly, history repeated itself and all of sudden I became an emigrant just as those writers I red with a great interest. Soon, I fully understood what Tarkovsky, during his life in exile meant when he proclaimed, "from there I saw here, and from here I can see there..." There, we all complained about what we needed and missed from here; here, we see clearly and regret everything we have lost - there. This is a typical Middle (and East) European case: existing "in between". Divided between rationalism and irrationalism, between systems and anarchy, between analysis and synthesis... existing somehow “out of the world”. Useless to underline, this situation of standing in between, is very true for my music as well.
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M y starting point considering musical genres was similar to my starting point with speaking languages. Due to my mixed background I became a perfect bilingual person from my very early ages and I can't really tell you which language I learned before. I acquired both in the same time although these languages differ tremendously (Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian). It was similar with music. I started to learn piano at the age of seven. Soon after my official lessons with my older sister we started to play easy pieces for piano four hands and during these sessions we also tried to play rock music pieces heard on the radio. With rock, for a piano player jazz was a next logical step and I absorbed all that music from the very beginning of my studies so they all became equally important to me. When things got more serious, in my late teenager days I felt under the heavy influence of - what we refer today – post Second World War avant-garde music or music modernism of 50s & 60s. The logical counterpoint to this music was a sheer interest in a progressive left wing philosophy, as the so called Frankfurt School (especially Adorno , Horkheimer and Fromm ) and overall Ernest Bloch , with great chapters on music in his groundwork entitled “ Das Prinzip Hoffnung ” (known under the English title as Principle of Hope , which was written during his emigration in the USA). This early and sincere enlightenment with historical modernistic tendencies in music – already anachronistic in those late seventies and early eighties, when post-modern composers gained the terrain on daily basis – quite soon faded away and by time, I definitely casted away the Adornian theory of cognitive character of art and music. In simple terms, even if music has something to do with truth or non-truth, I doubt that I can repeat the disharmony of the world by its own disharmony, and that by its own order can falsify the social order.
Ligeti once stated that, as very opposite of his western colleagues, he grew up in the environment extremely rich in various folk music - due to that fact his listening experience was quite different of those of his contemporaries in the West. I think that Ligeti's case is not the lonely one; more or less we in East Europe (especially in Transylvanian and the Balkan area) all experienced this sensation as well. Back to those days, among the avant-garde circles, composing in folkloristic idiom was a sin, and as the communist party always tolerated and welcomed folk art as something closely connected with people, being involved in folklore in any way, was a solid base to be labeled as somebody close to communist ideology. Meantime, my enthusiasm for the left orientated progressive philosophy (although well translated, it was never accepted of the party officials – in contrary) faded as well, when I realized that even the most progressive wing of Marxism was build upon a very erratic basis (the path which led me to that conviction was heavily influenced by the fantastic critical book of Leszek Kolakowski entitled as “ Main Currents of Marxism” ). To put it in one short sentence: a huge abyss separated theoria from praxis. In ex-communist countries - far from the trendy circles of “supermarket Marxists”, in those days very fashionable here in West – we faced that huge failure on everyday basis. Even in eighties – which means, far from the hardcore communist period - wholes in system were less than naïve, usually generated by heavy misinterpretations and lack of basic understanding. Let me do here a little digression and tell you a short story based on one not so pleasant experience of mine. As member of the editorial of Új Symposium , (New Symposium) - a magazine for social questions, art & culture published in ex-Yugoslavia on Hungarian language - and still as a student at the Music Academy , I managed to organize an international festival for new music and arts. The festival bore the title East European Experiences . This was just two years before the fall of the Berlin wall and I wanted to draw together musicians and artists from East Europe who were – more or less - detached from the establishment circles in their respective countries, consequently suffered from very restrain possibilities of producing and presenting their music and art. Without any doubt, they weren't politically correct in their countries and there was a little fear that this could be understood by authorities as an act of gathering anti-communist artists on that festival. This wasn't a gratuitous assumption but what happened was an unexpected Copernican turn. Quite soon, just before the start of the festival, the local cell of the communist party accused me, that with this summit of the East European block (then those countries, with the exception of Yugoslavia, were all members of the Warsaw Treaty ) I was trying to restore the spirit of the Stalinist ideology in Yugoslavia! The most disappointing moment behind this story is that the main propounder of those charges against me was also one of my professors on the Music Academy (and an active member of the party).
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I was always much interested in folk music in general ( Bart ó k employed rather the term of peasant music) and especially those of Transylvania and the Balkans – so instead of looking always forward and seeking after the “definite modernistic truth” I started to travel back in time, as very profound in that tradition - as we dig deeper and deeper - we are more and more faced with an incredible world of bitonal, polyrhythmic and non tempered systems, which stand more closer to the world of modern music esthetics than those employed in “ Hungarian Dances ” of Brahms and alike. The spirit of “ barbaro ” style is still omnipresent in that “ Hades ” of dark intervals, somehow rarely touched by the composers of that region, and to my sheer amazement, in the work of most of Bart ó k's pupils or persons who declared themselves as the descendants of Bart ó k's heritage, one can witness the marriage of the folkloristic language with the rather impressionistic musical sense, which is in my opinion the very opposite of the harsh expressionistic character of that music. Being in between modernism and the old tradition (and in my opinion the two doesn't necessarily exclude each other) and having bigamist relation with these two worlds, put me very often on the margin labeled again as “stranger”. Modernists in my music found too much traditional elements (to use their vocabulary: it lacks a more radical approach) and in the same time, post- modernists found too much modernistic solutions in it. My rather synthetic than exclusive mind, never could really understand nor justify the binary, black or white systems in art, where the “truth” or “false” Boolean algebra was the sole legitimate measurement for every artistic statement. Personally, I never had problems to accept Tabula Rasa of Arvo Pärt along with any compositions written by Helmut Lachenmann .
Mentioning here the avant-garde of the 50s & 60s, I must say it had a crucial significance for me. Young musicians and aestheticians today disparage the pioneers of modernism, pronouncing their work the failure of the century. Even if some of it was a failure in a certain sense, I am deeply grateful to these artists and musicians for the road they charted and the guidelines they gave us. I was personally never a great fan of the Darmstadt generation, but I have learned much from the authors who were also creating an avant-garde aesthetics outside or only partially in Darmstadt . As someone born in 1963, I cannot completely accept this music as my own, because today I feel a different zeitgeist , but on the other hand, the manic retreat into the past in various neo-movements ( Baroque , Romanticism ) which pay no attention whatsoever to the recent events, seems reactionary even to my often conservative mind.
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Every aspect of all avant-guardistic theories deal with the term of progress – it was omnipresent in the theory of Marxism and still is all-pervading in certain circles of artistic modernism: both ideologies deificated it with a dogmatic indocility. Progress is without doubt a very important term and tendency in today's civilisation. However , we shouldn't forget that civilisation stands for our technical standard. You can be much civilised, surrounded with the latest technological achievements but this doesn't necessarily means that your culture reached high values and vice versa . Many tribes in Africa with rich culture still live on a very basic level of the civilisation. Culture is in a realm of soul and as metaphysical category is not necessarily and always influenced by the technical achievements. There is a revolution and progress in technology, but not much in culture. At least I don't believe much in it, as this is a term borrowed from the utilitarian philosophies where everything is aiming to be materialised. Ralph Waldo Emerson in his diary stated that “ The history of literature . . . is a sum of very few ideas and of very few original tales, all the rest being variation of these.”
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Nowadays high culture often suffers and the old antagonism always reappears: crucified between thinking (brain) and singing (heart) it is somehow “lost in space” as communication is often put on the margins. With the pretext of “ being serious equals being complex ” - the brain always wins over the emotions. The latter is usually considered as something “ to be shame of ” as the “ truth ” has always to deal with the scientific objectivity, emptied of all emotions, which put us astray. In the same time, popular culture (with some post-modern tendencies in the field of classicall music as well!) suffers of the very opposite attitude – cheap emotions exclude any intellectual reflection and efforts. In my opinion, critical synthesis of the best from both world should be a kind of guidance – easy to say, not so easy to achieve with the high danger as mentioned above, to be excluded from the opposed camps and effortlessly labelled as stranger or even worst, as persona non grata . My music, certainly embraces different territories and melts down one vision, where modernity meets archaic. It isn't very simple to play, as a certain level of complexity – especially in rhythmic structure - is omnipresent. However, complexity never stands for the sake of cause; it is always the result of the inner logic and personal way of expression. It's not very difficult to write in a difficult manner but what is really difficult, is to make complex texture sounding comprehensible and acceptable.
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The old phantom always reappears and imposes the eternal question whether the new music in our current “zeitgeist” is still possible? The answer in my very case is inevitably yes, but the departure point doesn't seem anymore the same as it was for many composers in the second part of the last century. In my opinion, music is not about inventing technology or scientific concepts, but inventing music helped out by technology and sometimes inspired by some of the scientific concepts as well (but great scientific concepts don't necessarily generate great art – another very common avant-garde misleading concept). New isn't about “unseen” or “unheard” concepts, but rather lays in undiscovered vague territories of not enough explored heritage of our cultures - more and more menaced by technocratic tendencies. It is somewhere at the uninterrupted continuation level of the hidden face of archaic tradition which always reserves for us, surprisingly lot of freshness. And finally I think: the foreground again belongs rather to the individual than to any movement or style.
