When he cofounded the Budapest New Music Studio at the age of twenty-seven (for more details on the studio, please see László Sáry, chapter fifty), Zoltán Jeney was something of a rebel. He rebelled against officialdom, the all-pervasive ideology of the party and the kind of music he was expected to compose. He had been allowed to breathe some fresh air in Rome where he studied with Goffredo Petrassi in 1967/68. Today, he is an establishment figure: head of the Department of Composition at the Budapest Music University and winner of several major prizes awarded by the Hungarian government for artistic merit.

Of the former composers of the New Music Studio, he is perhaps the most cerebral in his approach to composition. It follows that his works are rather abstract in character, with processes carried through to their logical ending before another process is allowed to get under way. This fundamental feature does not wholly apply to Jeney’s chef d’oeuvre, much admired in Hungary: Halotti szertartás (Funeral Rites), a large-scale oratorio composed between 1987 and 2005, a setting of Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and Old Slavic texts as well as twentieth-century Hungarian and Italian poetry. The world premiere on October 22, 2005, under Zoltán Kocsis was a major triumph.

I.

I think Wittgenstein’s statement is true beyond his own book also on a more general level. For instance, it is valid for interpreting and understanding musical phenomena as well. To my mind, it provides the only way for us to understand Lutosławski’s case: his encounter with Cage’s piano concerto made him conscious of a change in a certain direction that was already taking place in his mind.

My own inverse case also bears out Wittgenstein, perhaps even more unequivocally. In 1964, at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, I saw Merce Cunningham’s ballet to music by John Cage. The choreography appealed to me just as little as did the music. In fact, the latter irritated me no end.