Margen Magazine #17 | Rogelio Pereira | interview | 1999 | English
– I would like to begin the interiew asking you about your work with “Group 180”. You made minimal repetitive music, greatly influenced by the great american musicians. What is the place of Steve Reich among them?
– Well, in the seventies, being behind the Iron Curtain we received information in a very much filtered way. In this atmosphere musical minimalism in its own simplicity and transparent existence was something like a ray of light for us. I remember meeting Reichs things for the first time, it was at the Warsaw Autumn when Krauses group were playing Clapping Music . This had an elementary effect on me, especially if you consider that we in Hungary had grown up in a hyper- conservative musical medium. On the other hand we had underground, forbidden rock and, for some of us, as for me, too, there was black jazz, for example. So, from that very minute I felt like, yes, this was my train. It was only a matter of detail that I went to see Reich and later on brought him to Hungary. Yes, it is undeniable that If I ever had any master or masters, then he probably has the first, most important place among them. By this I really mean a sort of musical message, and at that age when you are most responsive to these things.
– The pieces are mostly structures taking as a basis the use of acoustic instruments and synthesizers. One can perceive an interest in improvisation, renaissance orthodox music, baroque, gregorian and ethnic music.
– The effects that have befallen and still overtake a Central European thinker and emotional being, especially in such a strange era our region – just think about Kosovo – well if that person, as it happens, is a music maker, or a musical thinker- these effects cannot but leave their traces in our work, either. In particular not after Duchamp or Cage, not to mention Beuys. To make it clearer, one cannot do what was possible before them, they are undoubtedly a caesura. We cannot pretend as if they had never existed, nor can we pretend that Jimi Hendrix and Igor Stravinsky did not exist. And I could still carry on….
– Let’s talk a bit about multimedia art. What role would the visual arts play in your creative process, and, more concretely, what role would the aesthetic phenomenon of multimedia music play?
– Performance art was one of the most essential effects that attendant arts of the seventies – that is what they are called – had on me, from this direction . The Conscience/ Narrative Chamber Pieces (1993, Leo Records, England CD LR 185) is a summary of the works I composed during the eighties. In Skullbase Fracture we can experience the conversation between a civilian, telling anecdotes and a television set, this in front of the alternating musical background of a chamber orchestra and a gypsy band. In Optimistic Lecture a big band plays the accompaniment of a record player, which is playing the musical material of a Yom Kippur prayer. In the meantime there are hassidistic theses wedged between the big bands musical material, in the form of rap- like recitations. In The Sex Appeal of Death a child delivers a philosophic lecture about death, meanwhile an ensemble consisting of a string sextet and percussions imperceptibly fills the musical space from silence to an unbearable fortissimo. We may indeed consider these pieces multimedia performances, although when listening to this musical material, this fact is not self- evident since the record offers a kind of musical cross- section of events. I think it is important to note that verbal as well as visual events appear in a totally organic unity, events that I have arranged along, or according to musical, compositional principles of stage- management and direction.
– Space plays a key role as to mobility and openess of musical structures in sound installations. What is the importance of this in your works? – Musical space, both in the dimensions of depth and width has always played a significant role, even in my early works. It is a fact that is most succinct in those works of mine that are usually called installations, such as in the Doppelkoncert, which was written for computer- controlled radios and soloists, back in 1989/1991, or for example in my latest work, called Loop which was written for the Soundtower of St Pölten. Here I really had the opportunity to use space in all its aspects, but I cant tell you a single piece offhand where it hadnt been the aspect of space that concerned me most of all. Acoustic space is an elementary scope, space where I can move and play, it is my natural habitat, and I cannot help but be aware of this living space.
– Your solo career has always featured a great range of timbre nuances. Do you think the artistic result lies in the treatment of instruments during the mixing process in the recording studio?
– Look, I simply have to say that I had to realise I heard in tones, in timbres instead of harmonies. It seems that I dont have an ear for harmonies. It is no different in studios, either, since it is still the same person working there, me, the only difference is that you can be more precise, more accurate there.
– “Tractatus” is a work which has always attracted my attention. Because of the way it is structured and, above all, because of giving importance to several european languages which read the text Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. What do you new technologies bring here? Could one called Tractatus radiophonic art?
– I havent thought about whether it is radiophonic art or not, such kind of categories do not exist for me, so this part of things has never interested me. What really interested me was that civilian friends of mine told me these Wittgenstein fragments, people from different parts of the world, in their own homes, in their very personal and not reproduced voices. I handle these texts during the performances with the help of so- called samplers, in real- time, something that previous technologies did not make possible.
– In your latest CD “Relative Things” Leo Feigin made a selection from your soundscapes which would give certain atmosphere to same videos, films or installations. Laszlo Hortobagyi and Istvan Horvath have collaborated in the mixing process and they are, no doubt, two great names in hungarian electroacustic music. What would you highlight from the creative facet of these two musicians and sound engineers?
– Hortobágyi is an old friend of mine. I have learned a lot from him, although in a studio he has carried on with his work with the utmost patience, almost unnoticeably, creating a helpful atmosphere – which is much more than a sound engineers usual activity. In Pista Horváth case the most amazing thing is that he – being an engineer and not a musician – hears in frequencies, therefore is able to remain objective all the time.
– Text is an integral past in your works. These texts provoke images and musics which take us to peaceful atmosphere in the search of the human being for his/her past. Are you conscios that the listener should activate all his/her senses in order to listen to your music?
– In my pieces two different, radically contrasting treatments of text prevail. One of them we have already mentioned in connection with Narrative Chamber Pieces, where there is a dramaturgic tension between text and music. The other, which has also cropped up with reference to Tractatus, where I integrate the prosaic text as a voice, a part into the musical texture. What is common in both cases is that I do not take the listeners reaction into account.
Rogelio PEREIRA