For Hungarians who have taken any interest in the home contemporary music scene over the past several decades, the name of László Sáry is closely linked with the names of Zoltán Jeney, László Vidovszky, Péter Eötvös, Zoltán Kocsis, György Kurtág Jr., and some others who between them founded the Budapest New Music Studio in 1970. Just fourteen years after the Hungarian uprising and nearly twenty before the communist system collapsed, the ideological climate was anything but conducive to the formation of a group of composers and instrumentalists with the goal of presenting music from the East and West which was otherwise unavailable for the Hungarian public. They also played their own compositions, which had more to do with John Cage or Christian Wolff than what they had studied at the Academy of Music or heard at new music concerts in Budapest.

Looking back, one remembers—or rather, I remember—mainly the American contributions to the Studio’s programs. But László Sáry has been kind enough to supply me with the entire repertoire between 1970 and 1990, when the Studio ceased to exist as a closely knit group and its members got together only occasionally, once or twice a year.

Looking at the list of composers featured on the concerts, one realizes just how varied the repertoire was. Here are those played with some regularity: Pierre Boulez, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Charles Ives, Olivier Messiaen, Goffredo Petrassi, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, Erik Satie, Tomasz Sikorski, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgar Varèse, Christian Wolff, and Iannis Xenakis.

It was of course all terribly suspect and the music critic of the socialist party’s daily newspaper actually contacted the Ministry of Culture warning the powers that be that a perilous ideology, Zen Buddhism, was being propagated at the Studio’s concerts. Ironically, the group worked under the auspices and on the premises of the Young Communist League. In any case, the concerts were allowed to take place and some of those who attended them did so as a sign of opposition to the regime.

Through his son, György Kurtág followed the Studio’s activities with interest, attended some of their concerts, and was actually influenced in his own work by some of the pieces he heard and saw there (Vidovszky’s Autokoncert, in particular).