Journal From Sidi-Bou-Said
for piano

If music can be autobiographical, these pages certainly are. I wrote them in 1960, in a villa overlooking the magnificent bay of Carthage, in an intense and malevolent moment of my life. It seems to me now that if I was able to survive those days, it is partly due to the effort to put my state of mind into music. I hesitate to call this music "composition". It is more free behaviour at the piano, captured and recorded by memory and rendered as well as I could by notes. But what notes can fix this kind of magmatic rhythm, spasmodic dynamics, changing even between two consecutive performances of my own! I had to choose between two solutions: either to write down every nuance, every slight rhythmical change, marking the constant acceleration and slowing down – all this leading to a very detailed musical score though demanding spontaneity on the part of the interpreter; or to write in a schematic manner, leaving it to the performer to add the essentials, which, in the case of such a personal and traditionless style, could hardly be hoped for. I therefore opted for the first solution, hoping that he who is able to assimilate these complex rhythms will also be able to understand their fundamentally organic nature, and play them as if he had chanced on them at this very moment. These pieces are the central link of an archipelago going from Plasmas (1957) and A Journey around My Piano (1962), all having this auto-descriptive, free-association character. The three pages of the present journal commemorate three moments: 1) A late afternoon's hypertension leading to an orgasmic explosion and followed by an ironically described breakdown. 2) Ambience of the morning, whose light and capricious mood sinks step by step into a dark day-dream. 3) Emergence from a day nightmare and happy discovery of outside reality, symbolised by birds. Andre Hajdu.