Voyage Around My Piano
for piano

Published with the support of the Yehoshua Rabinowitz Tel-Aviv Foundation for literature and art The piece was written 30 years ago yet it seems to me to have been the most daring experiment I have ever made. I wonder where I had found the energy to accomplish it... Composed by a rather young Hungarian refugee living in Paris in the early 60s, it was in complete opposition to every music you could hear in the western musical world. It was no less a protest-work than a musical piece. It was a cry against the accepted ways of thinking in our century; a genuine expression of struggle for a different musical space and personal values as free-association thinking, temperamental writing and free style-melting –– part of which became more or less accepted in the 70s, when different "post-modern" trends came to light. A main characteristic of the piece: everything comes directly, with the least possible control, from the player-composer-improviser's body, while the musical notation is only a desperate effort to transcribe the physical-sonora impulse –– something close to the principles of active (tachiste) painting techniques of Pollock or Matthieu. At first sight this should make the piece similar to free improvisation, were it not for the obsessive care to attain maximum fidelity in the rendition of oral-nervous impulses, which required about 3 month of works (6-7 hours a day) and all this in order to sound like spontaneous playing rather than a composition! The leading principle during the process of composition was: no recapitulation of any sort, constant flow forward; no theme or motif should be remembered, no editing musical or "Gestalt" should be aim at. Everything must be unexpected , for the composer no less than for the listener –– but the same time there can be no forcing of the musical material which must happen as naturally as it happens in the most propitious moments of free improvisation. We could call the piece a pan-modulatory work: there is constant modulation in all levels –– tonal, rhythmical, stylistic, but also in speed, dynamics, mood and behaviour… All this makes it almost a theoretical piece, questioning the most basic axioms and behaviours of the musical tradition and aimed to postulate new rules for the musical game. This may seem utopian as is usual with extreme thinking, but at another level the piece is very concrete and direct –– due to the fact that everything in it comes from the open abysses of a living and active physical body, with all its limitations… Previously I had written several other piano works with somewhat similar trends: PLASMAS (1957;IMI 490) had already the kind of free-association technique combined with extreme rhythmical impulsivity –– but these were short pieces with much less style-mixing. JOURNAL FROM SIDI-BOU-SAID (1960; IMI 204) followed the same line in a less abrupt way. My contemporary orchestral writing –– A LITTLE HELL (1959; IMI 125) and BABELIANA (1964; IMI 155) follow, in their own way these deconstructive tendencies –– in opposition not only to ruling visualism but also to sonorism and texturism of the next wave. One last word to the (courageous) pianist willing to play this piece. He will face some major difficulties which are not the usual one encountered in contemporary music. I see these problems in the fact that the text requires a truly faithful rendering, to be as close as possible to my own playing. On the other hand, my playing was so spontaneous and free of time and meter, that the pianist, if he wants to be faithful to the spontaneity too, should play with the authority and inner freedom of composer… This would need probably two periods of study: first a slow interrogation of the written text and later a more personal and intuitive way of playing (different every time) until it will sound as if it has just been improvised by the player, without any composer at all… (Composer's notes)