Music-Making Begins with Articulation

Péter Eötvös in Conversation with Zoltán Farkas

 

Zoltán Farkas: You're moving back to Hungary-that's very welcome news, but at the same time I was also surprised as this is a country musicians tend to move away from rather. What does this mean more specifically in terms of how you divide your time?

Péter Eötvös: I would like to spend all those periods when I am composing in Budapest. If I'm conducting, I have to fly off to wherever the venue is in any case. In recent years, I have managed with great difficulty to set aside roughly six months in the year for composing. It's important that these periods should, as far as possible, be in single blocs because I need to empty my head completely when starting on a composition. All the information one accumulates in one's brain as a conductor is very detrimental to composition. It can sometimes take as long as three weeks before the material I have been conducting stops sounding in my head, and it's hard to wait until I am finally able to occupy myself with my own ideas. I don't know how others approach music composition-I suppose everyone has a different method or technique-but with me a plan is constantly winding round my head and accreting more and more bits of information. A composition only starts to assume definite shape when I lay it out directly on paper. I find I am unable to notate with a computer, because for me working with a pencil in itself manifests as sound; in other words, when a note is set down I hear it beforehand, and it will be as large as I hear it. One can see in the manuscript of his Cantata profana that Bartók simply writes a larger semitone on the horns. A manuscript contains much more information than a printed score about the relation between the graphical representation and the acoustic concept. That is why I prefer, whenever possible, to conduct from the manuscript.

Péter Eötvös was born in the Transylvanian town of Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc in Romania) on January 2, 1944. At the age of 14, on Zoltán Kodály's recommendation, he was admitted to the Budapest Academy of Music to study composition. He received a degree in composition at the Budapest Academy and another in conducting at the Cologne Hochschule für Music. He composed the music for a number of theatrical productions and films when still a student. Between 1968 and 1976 he played in Karlheinz Stockhausen's ensemble; he also worked for the Electronic Music Studio of Westdeutscher Rundfunk from 1971 to 1979. In 1978, Pierre Boulez invited him to conduct the opening concert of the IRCAM in Paris; after this he was appointed to be musical director of the Ensemble InterContemporain (a post he held until 1991). He was Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra between 1985 and 1988, and of the Budapest Festival Orchestra between 1992 and 1995. Between 1998 and 2001 he worked with the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Budapest in the same capacity. At present he is the Principal Conductor of Radio Hilversum (Holland) and the Principal Guest Conductor of both the SWR Symphony Orchestra of Stuttgart and the Symphony Orchestra of Gothenburg, specialising in the contemporary repertoire.
For a number of years beginning with 1985, he was in charge of the conductors' course at both the annual Bartók Seminary of Szombathely and the Festival Orchestra. In 1991 he founded the International Eötvös Institute for young conductors and composers. Between 1992 and 1998 he worked at the Hochschule für Music in Karlsruhe teaching conducting, a post he resumed in 2002. Between 1998 and 2001 he was a Professor at the Hochschule für Music in Cologne.
As a composer, a breakthrough came with an opera based on Chekhov's play, Three Sisters; following its triumphal premiere in Lyons in March 1998, it was performed on more than a hundred occasions in various opera houses in Europe. The compositions he wrote for orchestras and ensembles in the 1990s proved just as successful as his operas.
Z. F.

What led you to move back to Hungary?

It's simply an emotional relation, a physical need; because the air and the sunlight are as they are here at home, because people speak Hungarian, because in Budapest one can go to the theatre, the cinema programmes are better than in a great many foreign cities, where one simply can't go to the cinema because all the films that are running are commercial. That is what Budapest means for me; the remaining six months consist of a constant whizzing about the world.

You have often said how important film music was for you in your younger days. I've been told by András Szőllőssy as well that this was the main refuge for composers during the Sixties and where they learned how to handle time and find expression. It provided a discipline and freedom whilst remaining totally unfettered by the normative pressures imposed by the official schools of training in composition. It is well known that you were not admitted to the conducting class in Budapest, you studied that in Cologne; however, you only started conducting later on, when, in your own words, you had, thank God, forgotten what you had learned. I think you are far from alone in acknowledging that life begins at the point where a person forgets his schooling; equally, with the International Eötvös Institute you have established a school of your own. Quite obviously, you can't be looking to direct a school that needs to be jettisoned as a matter of urgency for life. What sorts of activity are pursued at the Institute, and how successful is it in putting into practice the Senecan principle of "learning for life, not school"?

At the time I applied for the conducting class at the Academy of Music in Budapest, they were quite right not to accept me. I didn't have a clue about anything. By then I had gained my diploma in composition and had picked up lots of practical experience in orchestral recordings for film studios, but I became totally mixed up the moment I cued in the first violins in the first bar of Beethoven's First Symphony because they did not sound in the place I had been expecting. You see, in film studios the musicians are not seated as they are in a regular symphony orchestra but in the way that suits the microphone or where I want. The decision not to admit me to the conducting class in Budapest set in motion the snowball of going abroad because I could not continue my studies in Budapest, as a result of which one thing followed the other. The Institute was founded in 1992 specifically with the aim of offering the younger generation the sort of assistance and information that I did not receive at that age-either in Budapest or, for that matter, at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik. There one is, twenty-some years old, diploma in hand, and not the slightest idea what to do with it. Can one now knock on someone's door? Does a conductor need a manager? How can one make do without a manager? I went through all those steps.
So the Eötvös Institute came into being in order to pass on that kind of help and advice. Back in 1992, it looked as if it was going to be set up at Gödöllő. That was when they were starting to restore the royal chateau there: this has a wonderful riding hall, and we would have been able to use that. My plan was to assemble an orchestra of young musicians who had just finished their formal training and would be able to work with us for two or three years. In the meantime I would prepare them for auditions, because these are so hugely important in the career of instrumental musicians. Gödöllő would have been a marvellous site, but the timing and funding did not work out, so nothing came of the plan.
In 1994 I moved to the Netherlands on becoming chief conductor for the Radio Chamber Orchestra there, and from then on I ran a certain number of seminars and courses that were based there-though fewer and fewer, because I simply did not have the time. Some seminars were advertised as being run by my Institute but without my being present in person. People's response to that was that this was of no interest, because what they wanted was the chance of making direct contact with me. Since then, we have managed to bring off certain shared projects with various festivals such as the one at Avignon. Two or three years ago, I went back to the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsuhe because they offered me a conducting class that I can run as I want. That's not to be sneezed at, because it's usually laid down what one has to teach as every school has its curriculum. I was given a completely free hand, however, not just regarding the contents of the course but also the methods I adopt for teaching the class. We agreed that only five or six students would be allowed to attend a semester, whilst the School covers their travel and accommodation expenses to enable the kids to come along with me on my full orchestral projects. They sit in for a whole week on the rehearsals; the mornings are spent with the orchestra, after lunch, until the evening, with the students. That has allowed a fantastic work-rate to evolve, in part because they study the same programme as the one I take the orchestra through that day: they study it through me, because over the course of the rehearsals they are able to see how the interpretation is developed.
The afternoons start with them analysing the morning session. They tell me what I did badly and what well, after which we turn to their programme. What rounds this off is that middle-ranking orchestras in Germany offer plenty of opportunities for young conductors, so they are able to take various programmes to a full symphony orchestra at least twice a month. An orchestra will draw on the surrounding music schools, so all the apprentice conductors of three or four schools in effect get the chance to work continuously with a full symphony orchestra. That's the current model, and it seems to be very interesting and useful.

Are there any Hungarian participants at Eötvös Institute courses?

No, there aren't.

And in earlier years?

Right at the beginning, I worked with a group which included László Tihanyi, Zsolt Nagy and Gergely Vajda, among others. In fact, they emerged from the intellectual circle that characterised the initial phase, and each of them has since gone on to become a master in his own right.

How well have those who have completed the School held their own?

When I was still at Gödöllő I put on a year during which I worked regularly with the students and took them with me from there to two or three European orchestras outside Hungary. One of them, Kwame Ryan, later became director of the Freiburg Opera House; his contract there ended this year, and I see he is now conducting at the Bastille. His career is the one that has made the greatest strides. I follow them all, or rather they stay in touch with me. Indeed, one of my original goals was that classes and groups should be formed that will maintain permanent contacts with one another throughout life. One notices as time goes by that groupings formed at music school can hold for life and be mutually very supportive. It is good to make a point of not allowing such friendships to lapse, because life later on becomes a competition for positions. One meets up with acquaintances in the most surprising places, and in terms of building a career there's no question that who you know or don't know can be a crucial factor. There's nothing to beat personal acquaintance. The young conductors who are working with me now in Karlsruhe have already been on visits to the Berlin and Munich Philharmonics, the BBC Symphony and other orchestras, which in itself gives them a chance to go back: "Oh yeah! You've been here before"-and that will still be true in thirty years. Keeping up contacts is one of the key aspects of working in groups.

You are seeking to bring on not just conductors but also orchestral musicians, and not of any ordinary standard either, but if you spot an attitude or bad habit that you don't like, then you devise some means-perhaps a specific piece-to correct that. What sort of frame of mind were you seeking to correct with your piece Steine, or what are you aiming to train musicians in with Triangel?

Ten to fifteen years ago, I composed several works for chamber ensemble or orchestra with a pedagogical aim. Steine was produced for Pierre Boulez's 60th birthday. The title is a play on words, since both "Pierre" and "Péter", or "Petrus", mean 'stone'-so, it might be translated as 'a stone for a stone'. The same distinguishing feature can be seen in Boulez's basic approach as in my own: a constant reciprocal link between teaching and practice as well as between composition and conducting. That is why we became close, simply because we have similar characters and stances to music-making.
In the first section of Steine, the conductor participates merely as a musician. He gives the musicians various tasks but then leaves them to sort out the possibilities for ensemble playing. Except for musicians who need to be seated (the cello or bass clarinet, for instance), the members of the orchestra stand. The piece starts, and the oboe, let's say, sets off, playing a rapid passage which is then passed on to someone else, who takes it over then in turn passes it on. So a link is created with a single gesture, and the musicians continue one another's gestures. Next there develops a game between two violinists. One of the basic problems violinists are confronted with is whether to bow with an upstroke or a downstroke: during orchestral rehearsals one is continually stopping to determine whether a passage should be sounded with the bows going up or down. I make a game out of that by having the two violinists stand facing one another, at some distance, then one bows downward on a note and the other has the job of playing the same in reverse, or in other words, with an upstroke. That requires the violinists to fight back their Pavlovian reflexes, because the moment one sees another bowing a downstroke, they automatically do the same. That has to be programmed in their brains, and it takes a while until they are able to switch over.
It's great fun for all: the audience can see what's going on, and the musicians also enjoy it because they are being posed difficult tasks. After that come various smaller or larger groups and imitations. One musician plays something, then the other repeats it, trying to play exactly the same, and this can be pushed to a point where the sample passes the limit of what can be registered. The idea came from a time when I was conducting The Miraculous Mandarin in Stuttgart, and I told the trombonist to listen to what the bassoon was playing. "The bassoon? I've never heard what the bassoon plays before. All I hear is the tuba, and that's it!" It turned out that this was not just a bit of joking but that musicians really do think that the conductor's job is to cue them, and they play what his hand dictates. The next section of Steine, therefore, consists of the bassoonist dictating to the trombonist: the trombone has to respond to three tones, depending on which ones he manages to hit. So if he hits the tone, then that's a good response; if he doesn't, then it's bad, and that's something everyone can hear. From the middle of the piece, the conductor all of a sudden takes over, and from then on a conducted section ensues.
I gave every musician two small pebbles from a stream to hold in their hands. The only instruction they were given about clicking the pebbles together was that when they were not playing and they heard a moment's silence they were to drop in a pebble click. So the relation between silence and sound is modulated in that way. There is no rest, strictly speaking: they are not idle when they are not playing but they have to hold the stones and drop in a click somewhere. That's the story behind Steine. I didn't compose it for a full orchestra but for an ensemble, because that sort of game is much more the natural territory of smaller ensembles, yet to my great surprise the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (SWR) also loved the piece, because it meant they could at last stand up and at last pay attention to one another, as a result of which a great working spirit developed.

To stay with your work as a conductor: you once called yourself a "test pilot" for new music, the one who tries pieces out for the first time. You admit that for you it is much more interesting-indeed, the only thing of true interest-to get new compositions to speak. Inevitably, that must mean you have encountered a lot of run-of-the-mill or distinctly poor works. True, you have also said that you learn a great deal from bad works too.

Certainly, one can learn a lot from mediocrity. If the instrumentation is poor, and one makes a note of what makes it poor, then that sticks in the mind as an abiding example of how not to do it. One can also learn a lot in formal terms, but in essence it's orchestration that is the most important domain. What I often come across, and for me it is a great surprise, is that I receive a huge number of scores that have no markings for articulation. In their scores, very many young and not-so-young composers are very precise about notating pitch and rhythm, and they manage somehow to orchestrate the material, but they give very few dynamic markings and no indications at all of articulation. Two-thirds of the scores I get are of that category. I simply don't understand why they bother, because for me music-making begins with articulation. I regard articulation as supremely important, followed by rhythm then the dynamics, whereas I would say intonation is last-in other words, exactly the reverse of the general idea of music. I put articulation right to the top in working with apprentice conductors. We constantly work in a group simply because one learns much more like that. I let them criticize one another. I banish the piano totally from this game: it's banned in teaching conducting. Pianists are the worst partner a conductor can have, because they can generate effects that will never be heard in real life. On top of which, pianists don't react in the same way at all as orchestral musicians and, most important of all, they take away the conductor's own concept of the music. They extinguish it by playing a thing, so there is now no need to picture it for oneself, because one then has to do little more than beat the time and the separate lines will stay more or less in synchrony.
I don't banish other instruments; indeed, there are some I am very happy to use. It's always a great pleasure to work with a violinist or clarinettist. It's really important for a young conductor to work together with various instrumentalists (and not pianists), because that's how one learns how to react and give instructions. When the class is together they always sing whilst conducting. They are required to vocally articulate the music they are conducting, and that articulation has a specific vocabulary: there are certain vowels and consonants that articulate precisely what the music is saying, and what comes out from that is that there is no need for a passage to have intonation or melody. The primary thing is for the conductor to deliver the "text". Once that text is present, then one can automatically superimpose the rhythm, dynamics and the rest, and after that try to sing it clearly. It's from doing these exercises that it has emerged that this is the order, not the reverse.

Yesterday, here in Balatonföldvár, they projected the film that was made of the first performance of your opera, Le Balcon, staged at Aix-en-Provence on 1 July 2002. In introducing this, you made a point of commenting how different the language of this work was from your previous operas. You claim not to know what your own style is, given that each work has to be tailored to its own language or style. At the same time, you are able to go back, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to a work you wrote thirty years ago in order to correct it, or enrich it with some new idea. When you are doing that are you projecting your experiences with the idioms you have been using since then back onto the old piece, or is it the same idiom that you used then except you are now able to hone it by applying some extra technical insight you have gained?

A bit of both. My attraction to film is probably prompted by the fact that it is possible to create Balcon musics of this type. For roughly the last ten years, I have seen it as my task to shape sonic densities. In Atlantis I managed for the first time to achieve a new type of orchestration and create a completely new form of sound which avoids having the orchestra sound like an orchestra. What emerges is an acoustic density of a totally different order of magnitude. What sparked this off was, in fact, my experience of surround-sound cinema. I remember being completely transfixed the first time I sat in one. It was an incredible experience to have the sound flooding in on one at such an intensity from all sides. Ever since then, I have been trying to find techniques of achieving that same sonic density with relatively few musicians. There's nothing new in that, as Mahler at the turn of the last century was essentially searching for, and found, this same type of sound picture or technique. Except it's not possible for me to take a Mahlerian orchestration as a point of departure, because I need to evolve completely different sound pictures and styles for my own materials. When we were listening yesterday evening to the demonstration of the Budapest Music Center's sound equipment at MIDEM, it struck me that I was experiencing roughly the same sound density as I do when I'm conducting with an orchestra in front of me. For a conductor the quantity of sound, the experience of the sound mass, is different from that of the listeners in the concert hall. The sound spills over me at a much greater intensity because I am standing inside it.
Through microphone placing and using loudspeaker relays it becomes possible to achieve a sort of sound picture that hitherto has not been possible-close-up listening. Loudspeaker-and I am more than happy to invert that to a Leisesprecher, a soft-speaker. A Leisesprecher has the new function of allowing a microphone to be placed as close to the sound source as the musician playing it hears it. A violinist hears his or her own instrument quite differently from a listener in the hall. If, however, a microphone is placed close to where the violinist's ears are, then that acoustic experience can be relayed to the public via loudspeakers. They hear a sound that they have not previously been able to hear in a concert. In my next opera, Angels in America, which is going to be presented at Theatre du Châtelet in Paris, every singer and every musician will be given a microphone which is able to relay this sort of quiet, intimate sound to the audience.

Let me go back to your statement that it's not the composer who has a style but each and every work. Do composers, on the other hand, have a musical mother-tongue? Does a foreign listener discern some kind of Hungarian character in your music, and can you yourself identify any such distinguishing features?

One recognises French composers because they also speak French in their music. It's the same with the British. I recall that in Paris during the '80s and '90s we tried to devise programmes that were not structured in terms of nationality but followed specific themes. It turned out that it was very hard to do that, because even today compositions that stem from the same linguistic area are musically very uniform: it's possible to tell within really quite a short space of time where a piece of music comes from. Of course, there are also some peculiar cases, like Toru Takemitsu, for example, whom on first hearing one might think was more French than anything else. Those are the exceptions, however. Right now, the tendency down to the present day is for the musical style to change from country to country, from one linguistic family to the next. As to what a foreigner perceives as being Hungarian in music-that's hard to tell. All I can say, once again, is that it lies above all in the articulation. When I conduct a piece by Bartók, I sing the articulation and stresses in certain passages for the benefit of the non-Hungarian musicians, after which they start playing in an entirely different manner. Not long ago, I conducted the Divertimento in Paris, and I had to sing right through it, note by note, to show what notes were stressed and which led where. The musicians were delighted to be learning a different way of articulating, because they don't get that from a lot of foreign conductors. All too often, they conduct Bartók in an alien fashion, because they don't understand, they are unfamiliar with his language.
I reckon that I can discern a Hungarian quality of articulation in the music of Ligeti and Kurtág as well as in my own pieces. There's an affinity to Bartók, employing certain tonal intervals and formulae, certain cadences that, I might almost say, originate from Hungarian folk song. The influence of Hungarian folk songs, even in a rather elementary form, can become perceptible in a composition. No doubt foreigners hear this, because it is not characteristic of other composers.

There was time, before the succession of big orchestral works of the 1990s got under way, when you declared that you had not done any writing for orchestra because as a conductor you knew more about orchestras than you had "to say" as a composer in this medium. Had you tried and not succeeded, or did you know from the outset that it was not yet the right time for you even to try?

The first piece that I wrote for a larger ensemble, Chinese Opera, was composed in 1986 for the tenth anniversary of the Ensemble Intercontemporain. My task, as I saw it-it seems to have already been the main aspect even back then-was to draw a sound volume out of that group of 28 or 29 members that would match that of a full orchestra. There are various techniques for achieving that. One is a stereo seating arrangement: having the same forces split into right- and left-hand desks produces a greater sonic energy, because for the listeners the same number of instrumentalists play in a larger space. I was stimulated to do so whilst rehearsing a piece by Bernd Alois Zimmermann for the BBC. It is a work in which the musicians are spread out like on a chess board, but for practical reasons I tried the piece out with the BBC Symphony Orchestra by placing the four flutes next to one another so that they would maintain contact and each musician would know what the other was playing. Anyway, we tried the piece out with the classical seating, then during the break the orchestra was rearranged with the split seating, which was when I experienced at first hand what a fantastic difference the seating can make to the sound quality and volume.
A second technique that pertains to the sound energy or density, of course, is the use of overtones: the greater the number of related overtones that are clustered into a chord, the more powerful the effect. This was the first piece that, although written for a quasi-orchestral ensemble, had an orchestral concept behind it, and this has stood its ground well since then. After that, in 1992, I wrote a piece for full orchestra, Pierre-Idyll, which I played with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, and I took a great dislike to it. We played it through once, then I just closed the score and tossed it onto the scrap heap. That was one of those negative cases, one of the poorer pieces in the repertoire, by which I learned what not to do. After that came Psychokosmos, which offered the experience of what I call improvisational composition, and then I switched to a totally different approach. Atlantis was composed in 1994-95, and during those two years, in essence, I succeeded in hitting upon a technique that I feel works.

Towards the end of Judit Kele's film portrait, The Seventh Door, you say that passion is an unknown quantity for you, because passion is something that carries people along with it, whereas you prefer to take your own things-control of your fate-in your own hands. Looking at it from the outside, I find the incredible single-mindedness with which you have been building your career almost scary. Haven't there been any downsides of that single-mindedness, or do you experience it quite differently?

Quite differently. Throughout my career and my life my experience has been that certain situations present themselves which one either takes note of or fails to take note of. I haven't built my career, but at certain points I have plugged into a career structure and one step has led to another. That is not the same thing as building a career, because I'm not thinking that in five years time I need to be in such-and-such a position then doing what it takes to get there, introducing myself, making appearances all over. Rather. well, to give you a banal example, in 1977, when I was living in Germany, the Solingen Orchestra advertised for a new musical director. I went along to the auditions and ended up in second place; I didn't get the job. I thought to myself, fair enough, something else is sure to come up; until then I'll carry on with what I'm doing. Two weeks later I received a request to conduct the inaugural concert at IRCAM in Paris. I accepted. Boulez was present and sat through all three rehearsals, and after the third he invited me to become director. The only reason I'm telling you this is because if I had won the position at Solingen, what would that have meant? If I had been admitted to the conducting course at Budapest, what would have happened next? These are steps that one doesn't make consciously: one has to, or one can, accept life simply as it is. At any given moment, I have to decide which path to take, and from then on I proceed in the direction I have chosen. In my own experience, what is important is not to go back, and not to fret over having taken a particular step. Once I am already on a path, I should carry on all the way to the next turning.

It's not uncommon to speak of our culture being on its last legs, in specific cases that realisation, and an associated anguish or sadness, can also permeate a work. Atlantis and IMA clearly demonstrate that you yourself have entertained thoughts of Apocalypse, the end of our civilisation-it is, in fact, the explicit subject of Atlantis. It seems to me nevertheless that you don't adopt a tragic attitude to being on the brink of a cataclysm. One strand of your ¶uvre reaches back to archaic strata of human culture, whilst at the same time-from Kosmos to Atlantis and IMA-they reflect a kind of fascination with science-fiction which has remained with you, virtually intact, since childhood. It could be that from a cosmic perspective, what is happening to our European culture really isn't such a tragedy. What are your thoughts?

Whilst I was working on my opera As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, the text of which was written in AD 1008 by a poet who was lady-in-waiting to the empress at the Japanese imperial court, I felt it was as if it had been written today. Its emotional world, its idiom, the encounters-they're all so consonant with our current way of thinking and emotional world. Which suggests that cultures develop by setting off from some point, reach a peak, and then there is an inevitable decline. The peaks in the various great civilisations are equivalent. The reason why what Japanese culture attained a millennium ago sounds so familiar today is because our own cultural development is now at a roughly similar level. It was probably much the same in Egypt, and if Atlantis ever did exist, then its culture too could well have been similar. So, what is important about cultures is when they develop, when they reach their peak, and when they sink back somewhere. In that regard, one has to speak about cultures constantly vanishing, and in that respect the process is dramatic, but not tragic. Naturally, it is important to each of us individually which particular phase of a culture's development we happen to be born into. I, for one, would not care to be living in the Middle Ages, but I would gladly do so in the Renaissance: I could accept that intellectual climate for myself. I'm certain I would have enjoyed myself in ancient Greece, but I'm not so sure about Rome, whilst the era of Japan's rise would probably have been of interest.
Each and every one of us has to sample for ourselves, and make up our own minds, whether we can give a stimulus at this stage of culture, whether we can accept that stage or should seek another society in which to live. What is extraordinary about the way the world is structured today-though of course it may well also have been true of earlier ages-is that such a large diversity of cultural levels co-exist alongside one another. For us Atlantis represents the permanent hope that an ideal world once existed, and we should have the goal of achieving something along the lines of the high civilisation that Atlantis had. At the end of each movement of my work Atlantis the strings play music from Szék [Sic, Romania] in Transylvania-a region that to this day has preserved its traditional ethnic-Hungarian dress, customs and music. When Pál Schiffer made a documentary film about Transylvania, back in 1992 or '93, it emerged that the young people there are no longer interested in their own culture. If they go out dancing, it is not to a traditional "dance house" but a discothčque, and the sort of tending of the culture that we know was still alive in Bartók's day has fallen away to the point that Transylvania's primary culture could vanish altogether within the next few decades-wrecked not under political pressure but through indifference. That is why this music from Szék is placed like a kind of refrain at the end of each movement: it too is one of the cultures that is threatened with extinction.

If one listens to the two works consecutively, it is obvious that IMA is a continuation of Atlantis, both harmonically and in its treatment of sound masses. You have already hinted that there is a dramaturgical strand that leads from the artificial "underwater" chorus of Atlantis to the actual chorus of IMA.

I composed Atlantis in 1994, but I was already starting to become occupied with the project back in 1966, because that was when I came across Sándor Weöres' poem Néma zene (Silent Music). This is laid out on the page in such a way that it presents a double poem-a poem within the poem-with parts of the text that are merged into the centre of each line yielding their own separate sense:

Sándor Weöres
Silent Music (extract*)

a psalm commences anew
unseen at land is a pure world
that has sunk beneath the foam
for the unruffled age of love they earnestly fought off recurrent night
thus it bore its ankylosed, blinded egos,
the tribe has succumbed to cowed ontologies
from the void of the dark now cries out the.

This was the section that drew me most, because I immediately somehow sensed that this kind of duality, the relation between the linear and the vertical readings, could also be replicated musically. I initially thought of a children's chorus and the text of the vertical reading, which runs "Atlantis / has sunk / the year / it sank / we don't / know." Then in the second movement that internal text was picked out, with a baritone singing the entire linear text and a child's voice, the vertical lines. At the very end of the poem Weöres graphically writes "whirlpool eddies. whirlpool eddies." For me, back in '66, that whirlpool presented to me in such a way that I placed the high tones on top, the low ones down below, and I envisaged a set of movements swirling towards the centre. The only trouble was that it is very easy to formulate this in pictorial terms, but I couldn't devise a way of formulating it in time-indeed, I've still not solved it now. As a matter of fact, I worked away at the idea for some two decades until I finally set it to one side to tackle Atlantis from another angle. The text of IMA is the final section of this same poem, which is written in a very strange "ancient mumbo-jumbo" in which scraps of Sanskrit, Latin and various exotic and African languages are all mixed up. I was attracted to the archaic aspect of the idiom. The harmony is built up on an amazingly simple basic figure of juxtaposed pairs of fifths: one pair is, let's say, C-G and next to that is A flat-E flat, which is a minor second higher, so the two are directly related. If those tones are inverted in the order C-A flat-G-E flat, then two minor sixths emerge; in other words, the tones remain the same, but a different sort of tension arises. It was the interval between G and A flat that I was most interested in, so the dual function of that vibration is the basis of IMA.

It's of extraordinary interest to me that the core musical thinking of entire works by you can be traced back to just a few tones or intervals. I was astonished when you pointed out that the entire dramaturgy of Three Sisters derives from a triad, a three-note figure-in other words, simple intervallic relations.

Let me say one more thing about Atlantis in that context. Tradition had it that the first ten kings of Atlantis were five pairs of twin sons: their mother was Clito, their father Poseidon, and the eldest of the first pair of twins was Atlas. The first letter of Atlas, of course, is A and the last letter is Es-or E flat-and I made use of that as a symbol: in fact, the piece starts with an A and an E flat, and as it happens the same two letters also frame the word Atlantis. The first chord that the strings build, and the young boy sings, is a ten-note tritone row: there are five pairs of twins, so each one is represented by a tritone. What is interesting about this is that the numbers five and ten represented the foundation of the whole Atlantis numerology, which is why there are five flutes-in fact, five or ten of everything in the piece. Of course, symbols like that, which I feel are strong, only help me as a starting-point for a composition, providing a foothold by means of which one is able to set off in some direction.

Do you have any compositions planned?

I am working on two fronts. One is plans for operas, which I have to accomplish within terribly tight time constraints. There are plans that simply cannot be fitted into the available time, whereas there are others that are so major they just have to be brought to fruition. My first opera, Three Sisters, was produced for Lyons Opera, the second, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, for the Donaueschingen Festival, the third, Le Balcon, for the Aix-en-Provence Festival. In November of this year Angels in America will be premiered at the Le Châtelet. I have already spent two or three years in negotiations over my next opera project, as preparing a work can take anything from six to ten years. That next one will again be for Lyons Opera and based on a Persian text: I am writing a one-acter from a short novel by an Afghan writer, who is now living in Paris. The one after that is being prepared for the Glyndebourne summer season, based on a Gabriel García Marquez short novel, Of Love and Other Demons. And there is yet another project, for the Munich Opera House in 2010. I don't know as yet what the subject of that will be, but they have asked me to make use of the house's big chorus.
The other series comprises mainly orchestral or concerto works. Since January I have been working on a solo piano piece for Pierre-Laurent Aimard to play with orchestra. Its feature is that every note struck on the piano will have an interval that is sounded simultaneously. The distance between the struck note and its associated note-it may be a fourth or a tone three octaves higher-will be controlled by another player, likewise on a keyboard. These "double" notes have essentially the same function as in colour-mixing: a new quality, a new kind of colour, emerges from merging two colours. All the parameters of the notes struck by the pianist will be transferred to the other tone, so in other words they will sound at exactly the same moment and with exactly the same energy. That is something no pianist could achieve with two hands. What this produces is a kind of colour-piano in which the interval determines the piano's colour. Technically it is not a difficult task, but from the compositional angle it is horrendously complicated because the entire range of possibilities is available, and I have to play my way through the entire scale to find out what the appropriate interval is. Of course, the technique doesn't apply just to a monodic line, so when a pianist is playing with all ten fingers, then twenty tones are being sounded, and those have to fit one another. Another of my plans is a violin concerto-like piece that is to be premiered at Lucerne in 2007-8: that will be a kind of Requiem in memory of the seven astronauts who were burned up on lift-off some years ago. Then I have yet another concerto-type project, one for two clarinettists-Sabine and Wolfgang Meyer-and string orchestra. Those are my plans for the next six years, then.

To finish off, I would revert to the fact that you are nevertheless going to be spending more time here, in Hungary, than before. What is running through my mind is a thought that the novelist and philosopher Béla Hamvas writes in Arlequin: "One cannot sneak through life away from others. Indeed, the more intensively someone lives, the more accessible he makes that intensive life to others." I am delighted, therefore, that henceforth your very intensive life will be moving ahead closer to us.

 

Zoltán Farkas
is a music historian and music critic. He is a fellow at the Music Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, specialising in 18th-century liturgical music and contemporary Hungarian music.