Sounds in Motion

A long overdue premiere and many Hungarian premieres mark this concert at the end of a course for students of the Hungarian Academy of Music, including Music for Five Conductors and one Percussionist, a piece by Gábor Kósa, which inspired us to find pieces composed here and abroad over the last 50 years, where the movements of the performers have musical meaning even when they do not have resultant sounds. The oldest piece on the program from 1962 is Nostalgie, by Dieter Schnebel, for solo conductor. At the other end of the spectrum is Georges Aperghis’ technically challenging Les Guetteurs de Sons from 1981, for 3 percussionists and 2 drums, of which one can only be sounded by pedal, so visually no movement can be attached to the sound, similarly to the sounds made by the performers’ mouths, while many movements in the score do not result in sound, or the sound is produced by another performer. Stanford Professor Mark Applebaum’s short Tlön, composed in 1995, is a comparable piece. Course head, Csaba Ajtony, teaches conducting at the Canadian University of Victoria, and is author of the study “Conducting as Interdisciplinary Performance”.