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One way or another, everyone struggles with the same question: what to do with tradition? It’s too advanced to overtake, too extensive to skirt around, an open-ended mass that barricades the way before us.

We can’t live without Johann Sebastian, and we might even be proud of this, but Johann Sebastian doesn’t solve our problems. The anti-traditionalist movements of the twentieth century have now floundered into the trap of their own tradition, and it’s understandable if they try to retreat. Performing artists (perhaps out of mere laziness?) saw back in the sixties that the future of music is in its own past, and now composers too have subscribed (but why indeed?) to this patent idiocy. All is interference, arrangement, quotation technique, comment, reminiscence, stylistic traits, synthesis, re-interpretation, and so forth. It is difficult even to list all the artifice that today’s composers have invented for the moulding together of originality of thought and conformity of language. However great the execution, the difference in quality between possessed and applied knowledge, with respect to the gesture and the intention it makes no difference whether someone writes simple reminiscences, or reworks old masterpieces so much that only those with the keenest hearing can detect from time to time a chord or a sound.

Naturally we can also say that classical music is actually contemporary music: our contemporary in the car, in hotel lifts and hypermarkets, and even (in companies who care about their image) in the restrooms.

Indeed, it is imperceptibly incorporated into our memories; its turns of harmony, its formal solutions set off our well-describable conditional reflexes, like Pavlov’s bell, but today for the individual the world has become fathomless in size and indefinable. From the Inuits to the Pigmies, from the one-fingered synthesiser players to symphony orchestras, from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, from Perotinus to Paris Hilton everyone enters the fray for fifteen minutes of fame with the same chances. What has been is also current. But if this is true, the composer can do nothing but, using the common musical language of the time, create his works, and there are countless possibilities for doing so. Neither is the open, unambiguous denigration of tradition simply useless: sooner or later it creates the vacuum that can be filled by a music which is new in every sense, and able to surpass degenerate music history.

But naturally survival also has a chance. Some vigorous reduction, the disclosure of the values of tradition beyond style, a radical reinterpretation of tradition may serve to further develop music and the renewal of its indispensable role in human existence.
László Melis’s suggestions are somewhere in the middle. A true mix, perhaps in the style of Niels Bohr (“I’d like tuppence worth of mixed sweets!” “Here’s a red one and a blue one. Mix them!”).

At any rate, they are raucous, acute and refined enough to entertain in the finest sense. They remind one of Kirnberger’s polonaises (Der allezeit fertige Polonaisen und Menuettencomponist), where something unexpected always happens, while we are never projected to the far side of the unknown and the uncertain. They broaden the scope of interpretation of conventions, and because of this we bear their hackneyed turns of phrase with patience. At the same time they give us a place to see the “new” as similar to the old. It’s not a bad feeling.

László Vidovszky
Translated by Richard Robinson

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László Melis was born in 1953 in Budapest. He graduated from the violin department of the Franz Liszt Music Academy. Since 1978, he has been a charter member of the Group 180 contemporary ensemble. He performed with this group in many concert halls in Europe until 1990 when the group disbanded. He wrote five pieces for the group, most of which have been recorded, and during this time he played with musicians who have defined today’s music (Louis Andriessen, Steve Reich, Terry Riley). He has been a member and soloist of the vocal ensemble Schola Hungarica, which has released 30 discs and given many concerts in Europe. He was the composer in residence for the Artus Dance theatre, and for the theatre troupe Monteverdi Wrestling Circle.

Since Group 180 ceased, he has been occupied basically with composing. His two chamber operas are The land of smiles (1985) and Kleist dies (1994). He has composed several cantatas, songs for large orchestra, ballet music and evening-long dance cantatas: Pearl Canon (1994), Armenian Legend (2001), Lost World (2003); solo instrumental pieces: Black & White (1999-2007), A la carte (2005); chamber works: Cellomania (2000), 3 errors for 2 flutes (2003), Wohltemperiertes Cymbal (2006), Running Amok, piano trio (2007); vocal pieces: Iphigeneia in Aulis, choral songs in ancient Greek (1998), and Of time and the river for Voces Equales (2001).

In addition he composed the soundtrack for several dozen feature films, and music for more than 200 theatre and radio plays. Currently he is working on several projects including an opera entitled Hölderlin flashback.


Discography
Group 180 – I. (Hungaroton 1983, 1995)
The Songs of Maldoror; Mulomedicina Chironis; The Ceremony LP (Hungaroton, 1989)
Pearl Canon (Artus, 1994)
The Apocalypse of Enoch (BMC, 2000)
Armenian legend (BMC, 2001)
Cellomania (Hungaroton, 2003)
A la Carte – Solo Works for Cello (Hungaroton, 2005)
Wohltempiertes Cymbal (Hungaroton, 2005)
Black & White - Suite for solo piano (BMC, 2008)


Zoltán Lengyel is a pianist and organist. He graduated with Volume I of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier at the Liszt Music Academy, Budapest, in 1995.

As a soloist he has given successful concerts in the UK, Germany, Spain, the USA, Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Moldavia and Hungary. He played the piano solo in Stravinsky's Petrushka with the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Carnegie Hall and other concert halls. During one recital series in the Budapest Nádor Hall he played the entire Partitas and French Suites by Bach, and Debussy's piano works. He has given organ recitals in Barcelona, Girona and Hungarian churches, with his own (portable) organ.

He has participated in many orchestral, ensemble, chamber and contemporary music projects. In Venezuela he has given a piano master class. He has written occasional music for theatre and film, and is involved with design of cultural web pages and concert organization.