First and Second questions.

Interview with László Hortogabgyi, Hungarian musician.

1. Origins
In fact, I don´t consider myself a musician because music is a time travel for me. It is the only one among the media available at present which is capable of taking you for a real time travel.
As a child I dreamt of otherworldly figures whose opal spaceships landed in front of our house. After long conversations I asked them to take me, in fact to save me from this, already then perceptibly hopeless situation. The feeling of alienation, and mostly the sensual pleasure of these talks can be compared to music. Such is music for me, so it is not important whether I am a musician or not, as I do not know either whether one has to belong to the temporary caste of musicians or not. But I am not really interested in this. On the other hand, music is the most important.

There are about two hundred kinds of music trends on the market today, at the same time it is becoming more and more difficult to enjoy them because the “overkill” of stimulus pouring on us through the satellites and media. This does not leave music untouched, perhaps it is the least untouched. So it is fashionable to match each existing note with each existing note, without any rational system. That is, these notes are matched not according to structure or ideology, but because they are unusual. This, however, feeds to the general indifference of the stimulus threshold what makes beating a new and individual path in music extremely difficult since packaging dominates over structure and form.

But I have the feeling that the same applies to certain area of the sciences and to the majority of human activities called art: We are standing in front of a wall and that is the end. For the time being we can cheerfully croak at each other through the media and frontiers, we can keep on stirring the various forms, but no new, genuine “universal” artistic everyday language, valid if only in a limited circle, can be created. What happened here is that the apparent human freedom given by technique and the welfare society has, in fact, lead to the complete standardisation and alienation of the individual. The only subject and product of that world, making life better and easier, is not made for the mankind, but for keeping alive and ensuring the continuous operation of the social metabolism called market economy, for the moment impossible to exceed.

2. Do you remember when you discovered music and what were your first thoughts about it?

I think that I am not existing as a personality in this respect. According to my strategy, I relish executing the program, the conception that I consider capable of functioning, like a robot. It is based on the fact, that I always learn everything I am interested in. For example, I am interested in the Japanese tonal system, then it seems to me that the closed Indian musical élite has admitted me as a traditional musician playing on vina and sitar, then I have learned how to cast a Javanese gong and what kind of intervals had been used by Persians in the 13th century, and particularly why. Then, I will compare them, certainly not for the sake of high sciences or an artistic mission, but simply because this is the best for me. The tuning of Kechuan flutes or the ancient Greek aulos and kythara literature also come under this category. There are only few thing that would be irrelevant. So, for example, synthesizers or designing and building big organs are very much relevant in this respect.

New, but in our days merely virtual, cultures are only going to be born, when each of the participating elements, and we are speaking about musical elements now, could manage to be built into a similar one within its own authentic method and cultural substance, and emphasizedly within the most genuine authenticity of its language and tone theory system. Only then, it will be authentic and, interestingly, work efficiently. There are common human poverty and experience hiding behind all of them, that will exceed beyond the arts and sciences, exceed far beyond the people, behind the people, into that horrifying hell, where it has used to live and where it has come from. And the hell and the poverty of ten thousand years is common on all continents.

The real high-culture is the form of an expedient from this, that is transformed and transcendent in some way, where, from the prehistoric man’s or the Africans’s six-four polyphonic rhythm, namely the drum language of the Ga tribe to the hundred-register organ built by the French organ builder master, Cavaille Coll, the underlying content is the same. Whether it is a tempered method or a 22-interval Indian scale, that is only the cultural anthropological wrapping.
In the World, Indian and Gamelan music have the most stringent mathematics, where none of the notes are improvised and in particular meditative. Here, every composition will be concreted into the repertoire by age-old repetitions, and still: the performer or the Javan orchestra will never be able to play the same music twice in the same way. This is the ocean of freedom, where all the participants, like engineers of the kingdom come, will build up the monumental, transcendent cathedral of Indian music of tiny little rational pavements and units.

The whole Schönberg line (reihe) is a Teuton barbed wire Walhalla compared to the Gamelan structure. The white man’s ergonomic detachedness from the music’s original ecstatic factor, together with his/her alienated scream, would become evident, and at the same time naturally delicious, through the sounding of the 32” Bombarde pipes of Cavaille Coll organs.
One thing remains certain that my travel to India was very important – I mean symbolically, not only in the meaning of its cultural part – because I managed to have access to a mode of existence in a rational way and obtaining measurable knowledge, that was actually one of the most sophisticated forms of hell of human coexistence. The “realized” socialism was an atomized and mind emaciating Asian type system. It was really simple to realize that it was identical with the everyday attitude of the historical tyrannical Asian regimes. In my opinion, in Budapest, in the years of 1964-65, the everyday attitude of a sensitive human being was not too far from the essence of an imaginary Asian-Indian way of life’s attitude. Certainly, everything I have been saying are creaking in a way, but the “suspension bridge”, the permeability can be found somewhere near to it.
It was obvious, that people mainly used to travel East just to have their Western misery cured. And, as for myself, I found in East even a larger Hell, still being a Hell that was sophisticated and worth studying and that had been functioning for more thousands of years.
But this Hell had learned everything that we, living here in the West, wouldn’t know even today. If we take a look at modern Japanese buto, or Zeami’ Zen, or even the Kathakali or Javanese opera, we will see with great astonishment what an alienation ritual has evolved for symbolizing awareness of life. And we may also admire how sophisticated the human mind can be, that it has been able to create such and similar systems of symbols to attain an imaginary freedom for its own ruined existence.

Well then, that was what took me to India, because that was the place where one of the most horrible, still precisely working, forms of homeostasis could be found, and because the culture could find there the positive outgoing methods and developed techniques of this possible way out, that is, the original false-consciousness of arts. However, I was interested not in how to sneak out of this world, how to desert, but instead, how people could utilize their talent for turning the infernal moaning of their musics into balm. Since, they are defeating the misunderstood but suffered reality by means of a system invented by themselves, and hereby they will turn a somersault. As for me, I was interested in what this system was in fact. I was able to defeat my own misery by understanding how others had succeeded to defeat it.