I must confess that I never conduct without a score – if I were to stop watching the score I would surely begin to improvise, and the orchestra would stare and wonder what was happening. Improvisation is the basis of making music, and construction is the basis of composition.

Improvisation happens at a given moment and is an unrepeatable process, while the essence of composition is to consider and choose certain sounds through repeating them several times, then writing down these chosen sounds for the performers. But a good performer will relay the composition he has “practiced” as if he were improvising, as if the sounds were his own ideas.

In 1971 I went to live on a small farm in Öldorf near Cologne, and there experimented with the various methods of composition from exact construction (Now, Miss!) to free improvisation (Music for New York). At the time I wanted to reach back to the origins, the roots of sounds; to vibration in which rhythm and melody coincide.

The most unusual project was perhaps Electrochronicle which I worked on from 1972-1974. The floating, the vibration of a standing interval, played on an organ and relayed through several sound converting appliances joined together, created original, independent melodies and rhythms. These sounds can be compared to the ripples made by a pebble thrown into water, where one can admire the beauty of the ripples running to meet each other and the laws that produce them at the same time. Electrochronicle is not improvised nor composed music; its beauty lies in the richness of the microscopic musical movements.

Dervish dance is a late descendant of the way of thinking that produced Electrochronicle. In this piece written for clarinet in 1993, the harmony created by the three-fold playback is an accidental phenomenon.

The 1971 recording of Music for New York was an improvisation on Hungarian folk instruments (zither and hurdy-gurdy) transformed with an English EMS (Synthi A) synthesizer. Two excellent jazz musicians, László Dés and András Dés added further improvisations in 2001. What a wonderful thing it is to bridge a span of 30 years in this way!

The recording of Now, Miss! was made in February 1973 on the basis of Beckett’s radioplay (Embers). In this composition – similarly to Beckett’s play – we hear the dialogue of two people sitting on a beach. János Négyesy plays the violin, I play on an organ transformed with a Synthi A. The original recording was remixed, supplemented with the sound of the sea, in 2002.

Péter Eötvös
2002