Parity
There can be no better way of revealing the symbiosis of teaching and concert performance than the concert series ”On the Spot”, which introduces the departments of the Liszt Academy. Ahead of the upcoming concerts presenting the Jazz Department and the Trombone Department, pianist Károly Binder, head of the Jazz Department, and trombonist Gusztáv Hőna, head of the Woodwinds and Brass Department, spoke to Tamás Vajna about the importance of scripted music and improvisation, the unavoidability of contemporary music, and the features of Hungarian jazz.
You, together with your students, are entering the On the Spot concert series. Do these young people understand the significance of being able to perform in one of the world's bastions of music, in the Grand Hall, respected as a sacred place by the greatest musicians of the past century?
GUSZTÁV HŐNA: The Grand Hall is one of the wonders of the world. I have every right to say this because I have lived there for virtually my entire life. We have held department concerts there before this, but the space, now that it has regained its original magnificence, is something else altogether, and I suspect that the students will be a bundle of nerves when they are finally set on stage.
KÁROLY BINDER: The opening of the renovated Liszt Academy has finally given several opportunities to jazz, so far treated as something of an orphan, and this inspiration has also had its impact on our work even before the opening. Aside from introducing the departments, the Grand Hall is primarily hosting concerts by world stars such as Ferenc Snétberger and Brad Mehldau. However, we will be giving samples of the genre every month in the Chamber Hall from 2014. Jazz in the Liszt Academy will be represented not by the world of jam sessions but rather by artists who cultivate its more artistic side.
Your art is hallmarked by experimentation. Is brass teaching (now in its 115th year) and jazz teaching (in its 38th year) characterized by a progressive trend?
GH: I am convinced that every musician must play the music of his/her age, in other words, a lot of contemporary music as well. At the beginning of my career, there was only a minimal amount of solo material written for trombone. There are no pieces specifically written for trombone in the Baroque, Classical or later Romantic periods of music. Mozart, too, only played cards with the horn players. When he lost, he wrote horn concertos for them. It appears that the other brass instrumentalists couldn't play cards. So, independently, we were only able to work with arrangements for a long time. But I decided that the trombone should not just be a solo instrument in jazz. Luckily, from 1972 I came into contact with very many composers in the course of my work with the Radio Orchestra, among them several young ones, and I pestered them about writing works for the trombone. This badgering was pretty successful, and over the years I have built up a very nice repertoire.
KB: Jean Cocteau said that jazz is contemporary folk music. That is its essence. Naturally, it has its tradition as well, and obviously a huge repertoire of standards. Tens of thousands of music history essays have debated its Afro-American roots and development. The thing is that jazz is not just American. And why exactly would we play American jazz in Budapest? When in the 1970s we turned to the roots of Hungarian folk music, the moniker "free" was hung on us, when in fact we were just thinking differently. It is now apparent that we were looking in the right direction, since today it is certainly not sacrilegious to say – rather it is an increasingly accepted fact in musicology – that jazz is an Afro-European genre. America was just the place where African music met with European music, and freed slaves created spirituals and gospel in churches on the basis of European theory of harmony.
Is improvisation the only significant difference between teaching jazz and classical music?
KB: In jazz, a high degree of instrumental know-how is blended with a preparedness to improvise. However, in essence it does not differ from the classical performing style. As Gershwin said, it is all a matter of rhythm: an F sharp minor scale can be played uniformly or "off-beat" with two-four stresses. The former is the classical sound, the latter jazz. Naturally, today's modern jazz makes sure to break this rhythm, with uneven rhythms and compositional elements also recognized in classical music. But let's not forget, all the great composers improvised, from Bach to Bartók. I believe that every work of music is governed by the trinity of improvisation, interpretation and composition, irrespective of whether we are talking about a grand orchestral classic or jazz.
GH: When you improvise, you are the composer as musician. But we have to play what the composer (even improvising in his head) wrote down. We have to watch the conductor, look at the score, and so on. Of course it is vital to be strict. At the same time, playing Wagner, for instance, is a true sporting achievement: we start Götterdämmerung in the afternoon and finish at night. And we have to play a terrible number of notes, and what's more, exclusively what has been written down. However, the result must be as though the music was born there and then.