Hungary’s most Surreal artist speaks to VanMusic

Questions 3, 4 and 5

László Hortobágyi was born in 1950 in Budapest, although he didn’t plan it.Therefore, besides his musicological and indological studies, he takes part in the design and building of a few organs throughout Hungary in Eastern Europe.

Consequently, since 1967 he has organized and made private expeditions – in the first place – to North-India for making recordings on the spot, studying philological-musicological sources, archives, libraries and pursuing practical studies.

Play instruments : rúdra-viná, surbahár, sitár, tablá,etc.

· In 1980 he established the musical society called “Gáyan Uttejak Mandal” It was named after the Hindu-Moslem musician’s society founded by Navraoji Kabraji in 1870 (it was the school of the great musicologist, V.N Bhatkhande). It’s members consider it to be their obligation to practice and to study the traditional cultures – as a planet-world heritage – of the Eastern branch of the history of music, primary the traditional Hindu-Moslem music, – within the framework of lectures, comparative music studies, making compositions sometimes concerts and performances.

· In 1984 he founded “The Oriental Music Archives” which is unique in Middle-Europe and which operates parallel with the music studio called “Gáyan Uttejak Studio” and the “Gáyan Uttejak Orchestra” .

· His music pieces composed in the classical Indian musical structure, together with other traditional and futuristic compositions are issued in the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, USA, France, England, Russia, Poland Hungary, among others

· Musicological and theoretical publications in the field of “Music of Hindusthán and Karnátaka”, “ Computer Music Systems”, “Virtual Mémesis of the Music”, “Frames of the Fictitious Societies”, “A Possible Bi-tonality System” , “Tála system of Hindusthán and the Alienation: Overcome of the Reality”, “ The’Polyphonic’ Shrutí System” among others.· Member of the Advisory Council of the Research Project of Computer. Music at the Institute of Musicology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

How was Guo born?

The roots of Gáyan Uttejak Orchestra (GUO) date back to the end of the 19th Century. The Gáyan Uttejak Mandal, the archetype of GUO’s establisher Gáyan Uttejak Society (founded in Hungary, 1981), was operated between 1870 and 1917 by Navraojji Kabraji and V.N. Bhatkhande in Mumbai. The Society was expanded in 1984 with the Archive of Oriental Music, to be considered unique and unrivalled in Eastern Europe, “Gáyan Uttejak Studio” and “Gáyan Uttejak Orchestra”, composed of musicians of the most diverse nationality and being the direct progenitor of the present GUO.

Could you expand on their concept?

Today, the core members of GUO, Nora Hortobagyi, Tibor Motyan, Zsolt Kosztyu, Tamas Littmann, Tamas Nadhazi, Marton Naray, Janos Strbk, Zsolt Szulyovszky, Pt. Vinode Pathak, Rajeev Janardan, dr. Kamala Shankar, are certainly also members of the aforementioned world community.

They are familiar with the centuries-old hypno-static musical practice of Asian high cultures, where the music itself is nothing else but a sophisticated technique of exode, that will, as the distillation of the diseased and uninhabitable socium, praise the thousand years old artistic techniques of imaginary and momentary escape of humanoid being from evolutionary and social captivity.

GUO desires to be a humble forerunner of the new Western-Amerasian Empire’s musical mappings that are coming into existence in the caste-system of future society. In addition, GUO is opposed to the traditional music industry that will operate as one of the Wellness-Neuronetics subdivisions of Wychi-Exonybm corporation.

The authentic classical Indian music’s total degeneration process became evident on a planetary level in the eighties, after the emergence of the zombie-genre of world music.

At the beginning of the manipulation of modern music by extra-European cultures, the death-gurus of the 60ies, those Oriental monsters would breathe the philosophical práná of the human misery of the horrible Oriental societies on the Western World, that is having a seized up mobility, becoming increasingly caste-like but still wanting to recover, and the poor youth, craving for the freedom, would inhale it like ganja.

You could realize one of the symptomatic enormities of the materialized world music even in its initial aspects: it cramme

d everything, from the most complex 18-interval Persian or 22-interval Indian way of octave division to the polyrhythms of Far-East, into the infinitely pitiful four-four, “A-A-B-A-B-A” compositional form of “white man’s” new music. Today, it doesn’t matter, whether there is Gamelan or Persian music, or an Andean sicu playing on top of the grooves: all the traditional musics, periodic rhythmic systems and timbres of unique instruments are only meringue-samples on the übergeil cake of entertainment industry.

In fact, those compositional forms and basic structures squeezed into grooves will, in their reinterpreted and stupefied reincarnations, colonize the Indian-African poly-rhythmic way of thinking.

In our days, this is followed by glittering metaphysical hodgepodges of money-maker projects saturated with saliva and sweet mucus called “world music”, where it is not the art forms of authentic, time-honoured traditions that are becoming dominant, but conversely, the “white man’s” idiotic loops of music, diminished to four-fours.

There is no difference, even as regards classical Indian music, where contemporary social existence and consciousness are able to do the impossible, and will transform the original meaning of Indian music, that is nothing else but the metaphysical musical exode of the most ancient awareness of life and the refined distillate of this ancestral life-suffering, and for today it has become Tantric rectum cleaning and music of entertainment industry characterized by beauty-world and wellness-ambient.

Here and now, there is something really shocking and historic taking place, indeed, that will affect not only the above mentioned areas.

Therefore, GUO are perhaps nothing else than a kind of Greenpeace of music, that is backed by (I would humbly take the liberty of hoping it) e.g. the GUO’s last triple material called “Guonthology”, which is opposed to the aforesaid trends, not only on an ultimatum’s level but also as a materialized counter-practice.

Could you explain El-Horto sound system?

This application was used between 1988-2000.

It is not needless to mention that each of the ethno-musical elements in the music of Gāyan Uttejak Orchestra -Lāszlō Hortobāgyi – that seems to be original and traditional – are digital reedified and restructured. None of the figuring ethno, vocal, instrumental phrases are in the reality: they consist of small resynthesized samples (20 msec – 9 sec) and digital assorted and rearranged of the original local sound recordings. It’s technological basis are a PCM-morphology using up the old FFT spectrum analysis as an algorhythm controller (like “convolution”) and a virtual overtone processing synthesis software developed by L.Hortobāgyi fifteen years earlier like Melodyne or Kyma-system of nowadays.

The new live program’s repertoire also based on the classical Indian instrumental technique of the Gáyaki-Ang and the Tablá-tárang polyrhythmic structure mixed with this earlier developed sound morphology of the granular synthesis technique according to his original “computed memesis of music” concept.