47 springs drenched me
summer’s heat parched me
autumn leaves covered me
winter frost numbed me
the white calves of girls walking along the riverbank
flirted with daylight up to the knee with the wind up to the thigh
while the ice cream melted
on the café terrace someone hanged himself in a glass
the eardrums echoed the throbbing of the cognac
at every table people were talking about something
the damp air of the room dipped itself in pipe smoke
so that the blade of laughter could slice the sighs thinner
the curves of sound traced frost flowers on the glass of the eyes
onto magnetic tape
and every spitful of sound froze solid
(Ernő Király: Téma variációkkal [Theme with Variations])
The lines above were written by Ernő Király, composer and folk-music researcher. The poem is a sensitive reflection of his artistic and aesthetic outlook: a distinctive mixture of radical simplicity and surrealist associations sketched with Impressionist lightness, folk-inspired austerity and raw modernity, archaism and the avant-garde, geometrical, measurable proportions and the proliferation of creative improvisation freed from control – qualities that best characterise the musical language he developed through decades of sustained work.
Ernő Király was born on 16 March 1919 in Szabadka (Subotica), Yugoslavia. His career as a composer began after the Second World War, in an era marked by the totalitarian dictatorship of the Soviet Union, which hermetically sealed off the Eastern European region from European intellectual and artistic thought and experience. As István Kovács Tickmayer observes in his study of Ernő Király: “Eastern European composers of the period heard only occasionally of techniques such as dodecaphony, serialism, aleatoricism, electronic or synthetic composition, etc. – at the time they did not know what these concepts meant and had scarcely any information about them. Yet no external force can restrain the creative will and its urge to seek out new challenges. Eastern European composers set about creating their own musical visions and soon arrived at new techniques, musical languages – musical materials – that had little or nothing in common with the Webern–Schoenberg–Darmstadt tradition.” Ernő Király’s creative disposition can be associated more closely with the experimental approach of American avant-garde composers – improvisation, instrument building, the interweaving of compositional and performance practice, multi-instrumentalism, etc. – than with the compositional practices of the European school, which had hardened into dogma.
The most formative aspect of his career was folk-music research, which he began in the 1950s. Travelling throughout Vojvodina, he collected the vocal and instrumental music of the ethnic groups living there – Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Slovaks and Roma – as well as folk instruments such as zithers, tamburas, flutes and pipes. His encounter with folk culture was crucial in three respects: it was here that Király first encountered the practices of improvisation and instrument making, as well as the rejection of the convention of equal temperament. “I asked an old man, ‘How do you tune this instrument?’ ‘Well, to my voice.’ ‘And the accompanying strings?’ ‘Well, they just drone away.’ He didn’t tune the instrument, and instead of strings he had put electrical wires on it. If that doesn’t bother him and it works for him, then why shouldn’t it work for me?” he recalled in a conversation with Zsolt Sőrés. He began studying the history of musical instruments and published an extensive study of his favourite instrument, the zither. Király was exhilarated by the purity and rawness of the sound world of folk music, since at the time this authentic layer had been almost completely obscured by folk-style popular songs and kitschy Gypsy entertainment music.
It was also in the 1950s that he became acquainted with electronic music and, largely under the influence of Pierre Schaeffer, began experimenting with tape manipulation himself. It was then that the fundamental idea of synthesising these two musical worlds first took shape in his mind: in his piece Tanulmány II. (Study II), for example, he manipulated the sound of a tambura ensemble using magnetic tape. His interest turned increasingly towards improvisation. “Meanwhile, in the course of collecting and researching folk music, I analysed folk music thoroughly. Gradually, what I regarded as a new kind of musical material began to emerge and develop before me. This material consists of fragments and remnants of speech, singing and instrumental music, triggered in the performer during the performance of a work by a particular spoken, sung or instrumental sound, and in the listener while listening to the piece. These are the acoustic manifestations of subconscious inner stirrings that may sound forth during the performance and reception of the work being heard and experienced – whether a folk song or a composed piece of music. The quality and abundance of the projection of these reflexive sounds depend on the individual’s musicality, sensitivity, richness of experience and, not least, technical skill and freedom from inhibitions.” Király’s emerging new conception of composition demanded a radically new attitude from both performer and audience. The relationships between composer and performer, and between performer and instrument, were reinterpreted; the boundary between composer and performer became increasingly blurred – the instrumentalist was given more numerous and more creative tasks in bringing the work to life – while the performer was required to possess a more concentrated and considered knowledge of the instrument and to master new playing techniques.
This compositional technique requires a form of musical notation different from the traditional one. “…musical notation also changed. New symbols had to be found to record the new musical ideas. The graphic appearance of scores changed substantially, becoming more visual.” In the course of experimenting with new forms of notation, he became increasingly interested in exploring the possibilities offered by graphic scores. Two biographical developments deserve mention in connection with the broadening of his creative spectrum. He met Dubravko Detoni, a highly talented Croatian composer and pianist, and his ensemble, Acezantez. Király initially wrote conventional compositions for the chamber ensemble, but at their encouragement he embarked on further experiments. He now had the opportunity to work with accomplished musicians and to expand his experience through the exploration of improvisation and the interpretation of graphic scores. At the same time, through his collaboration with his then wife, the poet, performer and singer Katalin Ladik, he became increasingly interested in visual literature, enriching his perspective and sensibility with yet another medium. A fine example is Reflection 7–T., included on his CD Spectrum, a musical interpretation of the visual text Egist, Orest, Iflgenia by Franci Zagoričnik.
Ernő Király’s graphic scores also exemplify the composer’s attraction to pure forms and proportions as well as to proliferating, complex structures, and his creative drive to achieve a synthesis of the two. Looking at his scores, one is immediately struck by the dominance of abstract geometric forms, which sometimes define the field of interpretation in their own right (Actiones), while at other times they exist in symbiosis with traditional forms of notation. In developing the musical material of his scores – like John Cage – he provides musicians with precise instructions while leaving sufficient room for them to realise their individual ideas. In the performance of some of his visual works, he once again draws on the resources of tape music. His compositional experience is combined in a distinctive way in Fekete-fehér énekhangra, hangszeregyüttesre és magnetofonra (Black and White for Voice, Instrumental Ensemble and Tape Recorder): “I was inspired to write this composition by Wassily Kandinsky’s graphic work of the same title, which I transposed into musical language in early 1986. The piece consists of two interwoven parts. In the first, based on the negative of the image, we hear primarily noises, non-tempered sounds and clusters, while the second part features tempered sounds, melodies and chords. Alongside traditional instruments, the work also employs a siren, a metronome and a friction drum, as well as children’s toys such as a rattle, a robot and others. In the first part, the instruments have to be prepared in order to produce non-tempered sounds. The musicians alternate between playing solo, in duos and together. Their playing mingles with the hum of machine noises and sound clusters previously recorded on magnetic tape. The singer speaks and sings letters and fragments of words. It is a play of shadow and light, a swirling of noises and tempered sounds within a humming space.”
While studying psychologist Elemér Gyulai’s theory of colour hearing, Király began composing a new series of graphic scores, the Flóra (Flora) cycle. Its underlying principle is that correlations can be established between colours and pitches. “On the basis of experiments conducted with seventy-nine subjects, Dr Gyulai established that red corresponds to the C–G tonal centre, yellow to D–A, and green to E–B,” writes István Kovács Tickmayer. In the Flóra series, each score consists of a photograph of a flower. The keys are determined by the colours of the flower, while density, tempo, motifs and other elements are determined by the flower’s veins and patterns.
In the 1970s, Ernő Király designed and built two instruments. He was undoubtedly influenced by the work of Harry Partch, and numerous parallels can be drawn between the ideas of the two artists. Partch was particularly fond of experimenting with new tuning systems based on microtonal divisions of the octave, closely connected with his theory of just intonation. His receptiveness to folk music and non-European music played an important role in this approach, and for this reason his works are often described as composed ethnic music. The zither accompanied Király throughout his career, together with his search for new sonorities inherent in the instrument and his desire to develop alternative playing techniques. “In the second half of our century, thanks to electroacoustic equipment, the form and name of some classical instruments changed, and with them the timbre and quality of the sounds played on them and, not least, the possibilities of technique and modes of playing. New sounds also emerged that had previously not existed or had scarcely been audible and therefore could not serve as means of expression.” (István Kovács Tickmayer). Among folk instruments, Ernő Király found the zither the most suitable for modification. He readily experimented with new tuning systems, installed pickups in the instruments, and used preparations and new implements – bows, beaters and finger devices – to produce sound from them.
This experimentation resulted in the creation of a new instrument in 1974: the citraphone. The instrument is built around a large box-shaped resonator, to which five zithers of different sizes and tunings are attached. Some of the zithers are constructed with frets spaced at quarter-tone intervals along their fingerboards, and the instrument has an overall range of five octaves. To increase its volume, Király fitted the citraphone with sixteen pickups, thus making it suitable for use in chamber ensembles.
Király created his other instrument, the tablophone, in 1976. His experiments with visual notation and his interest in visual poetry played an important role in the instrument’s design. “The purpose of this invention is to make the lines of a drawing or writing not only visible but audible as well, so that the person drawing and making music can give expression to both media at the very moment of creation.” (Ernő Király)
The resonating body of the tablophone consists of a slightly curved sheet of metal measuring 50 × 70 cm and 1 mm thick. Various sound-producing devices are mounted on its left-hand side, capable of producing both tempered and non-tempered sounds, while the paper on which the drawing or writing is made can be placed on the right-hand side. A wide variety of playing techniques can be employed on the instrument: striking, bowing, plucking, etc.
The CD Spectrum (…) is a representative selection of works from Ernő Király’s oeuvre that had never previously appeared on a sound recording. It includes a children’s opera in a folk-inspired idiom based on a Hungarian folktale; Király’s own tablophone and citraphone can also be heard, along with examples of his experiments in improvised music and in music using visual poetry as its source material.
(Text of the short study published in the booklet accompanying Ernő Király’s CD Spectrum, released by Autobus Records in Paris.)
(In: Magyar Műhely, art journal, Vol. 4, No. 123, 2002/4, pp. 57–60.)