Dissidence, Neo-avant-garde, Doublespeak. On the Context of the New Music Studio Budapest in the 1970s
Dissidence, Neo-avant-garde, Doublespeak. On the Context of the New Music Studio Budapest in the 1970s

Summary/Abstract: The first Hungarian experimental compositional workshop – called New Music Studio – was established in 1970 in Budapest within the frame of the Art Ensemble of the Youth Union of the Hungarian Socialist Worker’s Party. The official background helped young composers such as Zoltán Jeney (1943), László Sáry (1940) and László Vidovszky (1944) to perform Western European and American new music and make musical experiments as well. However, the ruling power followed their activity with suspicion, as their starting point in experimenting was the music of John Cage. First mentioned in the Hungarian musical press in 1959, Cage served as a symbol of imperialistic libertinism in the official discourse about new music, which was incompatible with the freedom concept created by the "benign" communist regime and accepted by the majority of the Hungarians. Thus, the composers of the New Music Studio, typical representatives of the 1968 generation, became members of the newly formed neo-avant-garde circles in Budapest, and got in contact with the democratic political opposition even though they were supported by an official organization. My paper focuses on the discourses about the appearance of the New Music Studio, scrutinizing written documents, such as criticism, interviews, self-explications and oral history sources. I seek to interpret the technique of "doublespeak" to reveal the ideological debates about modernism and experimentalism in Hungarian music.

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