Imitation and legitimation: Hungarian New Music in the 1970s
“While the new culture sought to emphasise originality and the value of every form of spontaneous human initiative […], in reality the cult of ancient authors encouraged it to attribute unquestionable validity to the models of the past.”
(Cesare Vasoli: The Aesthetics of Humanism and the Renaissance)
The problem of imitation in the contemporary Hungarian music of the 1970s emerged in a specific sense, one might even say as a question already answered. This answer was provided by the institutions of musical life and the cultural policy behind them, when they ensured publicity for those creators who were prepared to synthesise forms of imitation (in this case folklorism) and creation (the contemporary).
This philosophy was undeniably useful in the development of an art concerned purely with creative issues. At the same time, as we shall see, this publicity not only played a decisive role in the creation of a specific Hungarian composer model but also doubly filtered the composers before they could become known to the public: first at the level of their own time and then at the level of their subsequent reception (here I am referring to a similarly arbitrary polarisation of values brought about by the regime change [the Hungarian transition from state socialism to parliamentary democracy in 1989–90]).
Cultural policy granted a degree of freedom to the tolerated composers’ activity as authors, but reduced the scope of the questions they could raise: within the framework of the above theory, the problematic nature of their relationship to their own past and their social relations together with the aspects of propaganda (that is, the then similarly relevant issue of the composer–audience relationship), were transformed into questions that appeared to have been answered. With the disappearance of this political pressure in the late 1980s, the externally imposed immune system of contemporary music was dismantled, exposing it to the realities of the market and of failure and, ultimately, to oblivion.
By the period under discussion, Hungarian musical culture had reached a point at which, if its members were compelled to emigrate, it was not for political reasons but out of financial necessity. The borders were open in every direction for young musicians who competed successfully in numerous international competitions and signed contracts abroad: at home they were regarded not as renegades of Hungarian culture but as its envoys.
As noted above, cultural policy granted creators authorial (rather than audience-oriented) freedom, thereby creating a level of abstraction, an ivory-tower-like field of activity. This work undoubtedly stemmed from a positivist point, that is, its aim was research and discovery in the scholarly sense (music has always been open to alchemy); as a result, when seeking the new musical questions of the 1970s, we often find only answers to the music-historical problems of the period. The phenomenon of asking questions could emerge during the political thaw, through both organised and informal relations with audiences, and in the course of the increasingly strong processes of subjectivisation characteristic of the era. At the intersection of a politically legitimised, internationally contemporary constructivist (in retrospect we may call this formalist) avant-garde and postmodern compositional practice, and a tendency of self-image and root-seeking, nascent but going back to Bartók’s time, the ground became mixed and was the starting point for Kalmár's work.
It was not only Vasoli who identified (unknowingly) a parallel with early art: another excellent illustration of the situation in Hungary of the avant-garde emerging within modernism is provided in the Beethoven monograph of our distinguished music historian Bence Szabolcsi:
“First and foremost, the strongly social character of golden age art loosens, along with its organic integration into the life of an immediately and directly responsive, art-literate elite community. […] Yet this loosening is ambiguous and two-directional: we break away from society not only in order to live for ourselves, but also in order to sense around us an invisible yet even larger community: humanity.” The 1970s did not constitute a period boundary in the literal sense: what we are dealing with is a dual birth, in which modernism, constantly expanding its boundaries yet still operating within the limits of its own innovativeness, is ruptured by the avant-garde, making room for postmodernism, which fundamentally questions both the artwork and the artist and, in its inward-turning state, forges a path with its profanity. The truth of the quoted passage is distorted: we cannot withdraw into this invisible community by withdrawing from it; the decades that have passed have shown that l’art pour l’art and related isms effectively suspended the relationship between creator and audience, and when high art became profane later, its original mystery was destroyed. That mystery can no longer be regained by force, by rollback, or by questions.
Nevertheless, we may say that the Hungarian avant-garde aspirations of the period under discussion largely avoided these dilemmas. The reason for this was state violence which on the one hand itself caused the rollback and assumed (insofar as it could have at all assumed) the consequences of that rollback and on the other hand suspended questions and replaced them with answers. Just as the concept of decadence shifted from an ethical–aesthetic category into a productive one, contemporary music likewise became a state-supported programme at the national level, as a cultural product representing the country in the West, while communication with the audience as a reflective force became, as far as possible, one-directional. This is exemplified by the suppression of self-organised initiatives and by the distortion of record production and sales statistics. It is worth noting here that in this period one of, and the not even earliest, coincidental encounters took place between a political approach that separated the artist and emphasised their theoretical role and a broader global tendency pointing in the same direction.
An important actor in this double-edged propaganda operation was Hungaroton, known until 1969 as the Hungarian Record Manufacturing Company. Its contemporary music series began in the early 1960s and came to an end in the early 1990s. (After the departure of director Jenő Bors we are aware only of archival releases and of several similar series that lacked comparable state support.) Even so, the programme resulted in the release of close to one hundred records. This activity, combined with appropriately informative and presentational formats, made it possible for both the label and Hungarian composers to gain international recognition, functioning as a form of cultural export to the West.
This recognition from the top did not amount to full social legitimacy, even if we take into account that our composers were worthy disciples of Bartók, Kodály, Dohnányi and Weiner. It was, however, sufficient to form a respectful protective shell around those working within it (who had begun their path at the Liszt Academy), a shell that provided legitimation in both political and scholarly terms, in keeping with the paradigm of the composer as researcher. The distortions that emerged later from this arrangement (the two pillars, like the new clothes of the fairy-tale king, vanished as a fraud during the regime change) relegated contemporary musical culture to a high degree of social exclusion: into the concert halls of ‘high’ culture in the literal sense, and into oblivion.
“Shall we erase the past once and for all?” asks János Breuer in his article written in the Szabolcsi debate, defending the legacy of musicology. He emphasises that, alongside the struggle against oppression, the years before the regime change also offer another example that is particularly important today. By now, music has lost its cultural role and its contribution to general education, due in part to the absence of communication between the educated or education-seeking reader and the musician or musicologist. Today, oppression is represented by something else, but its power to erase the past is no less strong. Let us quote again Szabolcsi’s work from 1947: “This is the language of crises, anxieties, great liberations, clashes and eruptions. The hoops of the old social order have burst apart, or at least loosened; the new art sooner or later steps out of the disintegrating social framework. It no longer thinks in types and series, but rather commemorates its own development in individual works. This is both a virtue and a necessity, and the new generation forges a virtue out of necessity; for it not only does not wish to create as easily, as abundantly and as serially as its predecessors, but is no longer able to do so either.” This description applies to the low point of every great era: it documents the birth of modernism just as much as it provides a foundation for characterising Kalmár’s quiet revolution, or for outlining the emergence of a composer model that remains viable even today. […]
New musical tendencies reached Hungarian composers primarily through informal channels, above all through scores, as there were few events in Hungary. This particular situation compelled performers to interpret the works themselves, at first hand. The consequences were twofold: first, if they undertook a performance, they had to work out a reconstruction of the piece through a strongly Hungarian lens, yet aiming for reality; second, Hungarian composers’ works, which emerged in response to contemporary Western music theories that reached them not as fully formed systems but in imprint became comparable to foreign compositions (this applied not only within Hungary but also, through their public visibility, a result of the effectiveness of record production and score publishing, in the West as well) and were on a similar contemporary conceptual level: they are speculative in ambition yet grounded in tradition and endowed with internal structure. […]
Construction and sacrality: László Kalmár
The life path of the composer who appeared among the members of the Budapest Chamber Ensemble in 1968, prior to the group formations of composers and performers that defined the period (Új Zenei Stúdió (New Music Studio), Fiatal Zeneszerzők Csoportja (Group of Young Composers), Új Zenei Műhely (New Music Workshop), 180-as Csoport (Group 180)), is distinctive and, for us, symbolic. He initially trained as a scientist before turning towards music; he arrived among Academy-trained composers as an ‘outsider’: he completed his studies at the National Conservatory [today Bartók Béla Conservatory], an institution that was relatively liberal in spirit yet resistant to modernity. At the same time, as an autodidact and as a private pupil of Ferenc Farkas, he independently followed the path taken by his contemporaries studying at the Liszt Academy. This was followed by the ‘corporate ladder’ he climbed as a music editor at Zeneműkiadó (Editio Musica Budapest): this was clearly not a success story. Kalmár nevertheless managed to turn even this latter phase to his advantage. “I had to read through and evaluate hundreds, indeed I might say thousands, of pieces, and to do so very thoroughly, very thoughtfully and with a great sense of responsibility – works that one would hardly examine so carefully in one’s free time, would not take the trouble over, and would scarcely have the time for. The result of this was that I came to know without exception every single piece written by my colleagues, which is a very special gift of life” (Szigeti–Kalmár 1992, 18).
Alongside this work, there was naturally no opportunity for studying in the West; yet a form of passive emigration could still occur, as a result of which he became a recognised composer abroad, and especially in England.
His generation was brought up in freedom, even if this freedom was only relative during the cultural terror of Zhdanovism in ’48, and, with a global musical outlook behind them, they could confront their own traditions freely, including, once again, the idea of national character. In addition to the musical trends outlined above, a significant revival can be observed in conjunction with the re-evaluation of the Bartók legacy; all of these influences came into play when composers were seeking form for their musical intentions.
In Kalmár’s case, these two layers can be sharply distinguished: intention is represented by strict construction, form by religiosity. When we speak of religiosity here, it is not only the definition of ‘new sacrality’ that is activated, but also poetry, ritual and ideology independent of Marxism. However, and this is where the ‘and’ in the title above gains its meaning, there is also an unconditional submission to construction, a faith in its power. This is the inherently shared world of a (natural) scientific mindset and a twentieth-century creative existence.
We see a refined reawakening of the turn-of-the-century idea of saying nothing as one of the fundamental theses of the neo-avant-garde: in Kalmár’s case we are confronted with a complete aesthetic suspension, in which our intellect and our hearing pass perspectives back and forth from the very first moment. His works, however, remain in the area where the listener can still intellectually determine the layers of the structure, and this is sufficient to underpin what is transcendent or, to put it another way, subjective.
If we look for a system in Kalmár’s works, it is always openly revealed to us. Already in the titles of the works themselves pure form is revealed (Ciklusok (Cycles), Szonáta (Sonata), Négy kánon (Four Canons), etc.; see the non-exhaustive list in Appendix 2): the musical pieces themselves disclose their inner rules to us, while we continuously sense the hand of a strong organising intention at work within them. This work, though arbitrary, proceeds with confidence, guiding the listener throughout without recourse to musical clichés (surface catharses). This is chamber music, from a period in which the composer, in troubadour fashion, performs his own work together with his companions, yet where the physically measurable force of symphonic means is still present, as is the freshness of modernism, and where the looseness oriented towards the individualism of the 1970s is already beginning to emerge.
It is no coincidence that humanism reappears here. In Kalmár’s enlightened crucible, the restless metropolitan wanderer and the song of the working people unexpectedly meet once again, as do the occultist mathematician-astrologer and the spiritually charged performance. This is a celebration of being understood, though articulated in post-Romantic dance steps: music that is protected from extremes within its emotional spectrum, speaking less in the language of expression than in that of communication.
What has survived of all this is presumably a distorted image. But we should add that it is not the works that have worn down into a gallery tone, but the external world that received them. This is why the recordings appear sombre and raw, and why the force of their tension is, as a result, deflected from its original intention. However, the sound is just as alive today. The sounds of the instruments’ bodies (one might mention the guitar tapping in Trio), the confidently yet covertly handled dissonances and dark tonalities, conjure up for us the cavern-world of a kind of music in which it is enough to pass through the first door for all the others to open before us; poetry disguised as music: the language leading to it can be mastered even by those attuned to the sounds of emotion and physicality, yet which our mathematician-intentionalist attitude cannot reach to observe by any other route. Its pure, seemingly daylight-clear forms either remain misunderstood or become understood – but only along this path. If we wish to characterise this stance in the light of the above, we may say this: in a contemporary world full of answers and explanations, our composer has for some reason returned to uncertainty, to the destabilised subject seeking its truth in the otherworldly. The forms of this search, however, were shaped in a ‘contemporary’ manner, disguised as conviction, as ism (the ism of retrospection, construction, the series). In this way it may take on a (neo-)romantic, perhaps even neo-classical colouring; yet in summary we can say that it was precisely in this manner that Kalmár encoded his music into his own time.
Excerpt from Balázs Kovács’s paper Kalmár László: Notturno No. 1 – az Új Zene kérdései a '70-es évek kortárs magyar zenéjében (lit. László Kalmár: Notturno No. 1 – Issues of New Music in Contemporary Hungarian Music of the 1970s) [2002]