Avant – Jazz, Impriovised and Contemporary Classical Music Issue 15 | Chris Blackford | essay | Spring 2000 | English Skullbase Fractures And Relative Things Snapshots From The World Of Tibor Szemző I’m looking at a man s face. Watching him constantly. The opening lines of Skullbase Fracture (1984), for narrator and TV, chamber ensemble and Gipsyband. Things get curiouser and curiouser, as the man doing the staring sneaks up on the man being stared at, only to find that the latter exudes a Godawful smell like rotten cheese; the cause eventually found to be a pair of nylon socks. So it goes on, P.G. Havlicek s bizarre mélange of detective, clinical, metaphysical and political discourses, where the shaky line between reason and madness, perspicacity and absurdity, soon becomes invisible. Add to this, an unlikely choice of musical accompaniment – genteel,
romantic chamber music almost imperceptibly dissolving into a saccharin Hungarian folk theme, performed by Jeno Oláh Gipsyband – and you have a half-hour work of intriguing subtlety and depth that repays repeat hearings. Skullbase Fracture was my first encounter with the idiosyncratic soundworld of Hungarian composer Tibor Szemző (born 1955, Budapest), and I daresay the same goes for most other similarly entranced New Music enthusiasts in Britain. It s also the first and longest of three Narrative Chamber Pieces eatured on The Conscience (Leo/Bahia Music CD LR 185/CDB 055, 1993), all of which demonstrate Szemző s acute ear for unexpected sonic juxtapositions. At a time (some like to call it postmodernism) when a host of composers, from the pop mainstream to the remotest of avant-garde backwaters, are busy engineering cultural and idiomatic collisions, Szemző s imaginative works prove that, in the right hands, a polystylistic method can still yield surprising, stimulating, even disturbing results. The Sex Appeal Of Death 1981), for child narrator, strings and drums, is definitely a case of the latter; an 11-minute excerpt from Tibor Hajas essay on how Death has become a taboo subject for analysis since the horrors of World War II, is read with a slow, haunting innocence by Szemző s daughter Tarina, over the Scelsi-like shimmering drone of a string quartet and pointillistic percussion. The third piece on The Conscience, Optimistic Lecture (1988), is an uplifting amalgam of punchy big band jazz (shades of George Russell) and Steve Reich influenced gamelan-minimalism, overlaid with the voice of Rabbi Akiba singing the Ovinu Malkenu Litany and Szemző himself quietly intoning a text about post-neoavantgarde behaviour˛ where staccato speech and instrumental rhythms are neatly fused. Similar experiments in combining religious/ritual voices with other musics had also been successfully achieved around the same time by Italians Roberto Musci and Giovanni Venosta (see Messages & Portraits on ReR) and, more famously, by Brian Eno and David Byrne further back in 1979-80 on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Optimistic Lectures a memorable addition to this strand of eclectic composition. Szemző s interest in Steve Reich s minimalism goes back to the 1970s. A performance of Clapping Music affected him deeply, striking a dramatic contrast with what he has described as the hyper-conservative climate of his studies at Bartók Conservatory, Budapest Academy and Schola Hungarica, which were centred on the music of Bartók and Kodály. However, while composers in other East European countries struggled to develop their art under repressive Communist regimes, Szemző says he found the Hungarian political system relatively liberal. Even so, he had to tune his radio to the BBC, Radio Free Europe and Voice Of America to savour forbidden fruit like Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Traffic, Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. Inspired by what he heard, he set up a trio of flute, viola and double bass, later adding an oboe. The group ran the stylistic gamut from Purcell, Bach and Bartók, to improvised music. By the late 70s, minimalism had filled Szemző s sky, so much so that he founded the chamber ensemble Group 180, specialising in a minimalist repertoire. Their only LP, made in 1983 for Hungaroton label, comprised works by Reich, Frederic Rzewski, Laszlo Melis, plus Water-Wonder (1982-83), Szemzős pulsating piece for flutes and tape delay, re-recorded in 1998 for the CD reissue of Snapshot From The Island (Leo/Bahia Music CD LR 277/CDB 057, 1999), an album that also contains Snapshot From The Island (1986) and Let s Go Out And Dance(1985), both alive with the windswept sonorities of Szemző s multitracked flutes. Reich, who met Szemző when he visited Hungary, was thrilled by Group 180 s numerous performances of his works, paying Szemző and his group the highest compliment by announcing that they played them as well, sometimes better than his own ensemble. Multimedia projects, for the concert hall, cinema, gallery and theatre, have always been at the heart of Szemző s creative activity, and film maker Péter Forgács one of his frequent collaborators. This fertile partnership produced Wittgenstein Tractatus (1991-95), a fascinating half-hour work for video, narrators and musicians based on the aphoristic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Austrian (later to become British) philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (also the subject of a memorable bio pic by Derek Jarman). In its 1995 recording (see Tractatus, Leo/Bahia Music CD LR 227/CDB 021), Szemző plays all instruments and hums the subdued, yet somewhat wistful theme which, in its numerous repetitions, has something of Saties Vexations about it. Narrators speaking a variety of European languages come and go, reciting fragments of text, as the understated arrangement of piano, electronics, bass and percussion creates a ruminative atmosphere where time seems suspended. Other results of the Szemző/Forgács partnership can be heard on Relative Things (Leo/Bahia Music CD LR 250/CDB 042, 1998), a collection of film soundscapes from 1994-97. Once again, Szemző s precise deployment of simple chamber gestures is highly impressive, conjuring atmospheric pieces by turns lush, sparse and polyrhythmic. Tamás Tóth s vibrant bass guitar, often sounding as though plucked from an early 70s jazz-rock album, is surprisingly effective, providing a robust, occasionally almost funky, presence amid the more expansive elements such as spectral flutes and string drones. Jon Hassell s Fourth World ethnic-minimalism springs to mind in a few places, notably in the fluid percussive rhythms of & Ground, and one can imagine Laurie Anderson s soothing vocals hovering over the serene flute and keyboard texture of The Easy One. But the overall style is unmistakably Szemző s and, even without the visuals of Forgács, Ferenc Moldoványi and Ádám Csillag, these pieces are particularly evocative. There s a familiar feel to the wafts of plangent, post-romantic strings on the film soundtrack to 1997ąs The Other Shore (see The Other Shore, Leo/Bahia Music CD LR 281/CDB 058, 1999) that is again unmistakably Szemző; and a return to the use
of recontextualised ritualistic voices, in this case chanting recorded at a Buddhist temple. As on Relative Things, the arrangement here for The Gordion Knot Company and Mixed Ensemble is uncluttered; the aforementioned strings supported by a sometimes rocky rhythm section of bass guitar and drums, plus Szemző s trademark spectral flute. Symultan concerns the trials and tribulations of Hungarian gypsies, including their persecution at the hands of the Nazis. Szemző overlaps the voices of a gypsy community, in the process drawing attention to the phonetic percussiveness of their speech. Finally, Gull for string quartet and tabla, is interestingly reminiscent of Brian Eno s slowed-down version of Pachelbels Canon in D Major (see Discreet Music, 1975) where warped romanticism is the order of the day. Szemző s largo strings achieve a similar off-centre timbral quality, at times possessing the mysterious and archaic tones of a consort of viols. A final thought. The more one hears and reads about Szemző s work, the more one realises that much of his oeuvre has been composed in response to, and is intended to be heard with, the visual image – cinematic and theatrical. Obviously CDs can only give us the audio side of the audio-visual equation, but the growing availability of DVDs with their increased storage capacity, superior picture quality to videotape, digital sound and versatile indexing (many menu possibilities), provides an ideal format in which to experience the full richness of multimedia performance. The future presentation of Tibor Szemző s distinctive compositions may lie in this format.