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Recycled Tradition is an interdisciplinary research project looking for valid definitions of 'tradition' in the musical sense, and searching for new methods how to recycle any kind of traditional material in a critical way.
Since their will be also an official site on the participating university servers, that one is intended to be a private log of the project with some personal remarks wich are not to be treated as scientific statement. But do as an artistic one.
zero point
One of my former examinators said after a composition-exam: "He is an adventurer !" ( Maga egy kalandor hun. orig.) And he was right. I´m looking for adventure in music and outside of it, assume that to discover really exciting, precious things one has to get on the way - even if it turns out that the solution was right near him.
I was never seriously involved in folk music. Knew quite a lot about but it seemed to me like a conserve wich has a lot of preservatives and remembers to an original but has a bad taste. Accidentally I heard once at a festival among several folk-music bands they´ve 'learnt' how to play - an original one (from Magyarpalatka). They had no excellence in terms of playing the most virtuoso passages or the fastest tempi. Were grey, rugged, heavy, played with a terrifying screaming sound and had the power of 1000 horses. They played of "elkeseredettség", their way of playing was without alternatives, that is the only musical reality it exists for them. Behind that is no conscious choice - it is like a fate to be born and grow up inside one singular compulsory musical enviroment. That was the point I begun to understand what tradition means.
That is what most of us composers want to achieve: an own world where our own logic together with our intuition destillate a limited number of solutions, where we can choose one out of them.
what now ?
the outline of this project is quite simple. recording musicians and singers possibly in studio-quality, cut it on samples, look for something inspirating for you, process it, work with it as material and make great music. for most of our international community these are unknown sources - listen and work with it.
composing means making decisions according to inner rules, building up a coherent inner world which has his own tradition. We use (conscious or unconscious) very different existing patterns, quotations, we steal quite often. There is although a qualitative difference between using existing material as a tool of personal statement or in the role of that. To be more clear: if somebody writes a piece with a main line borrowed from a folk-tune, he passes the space of his own musical statement to an existing material. If somebody uses this folk-tune to build a material to work with, and out of it creates an other layer of musical statement, then he uses that music as tool for his decisions and artistic statement.
With this project I would like to promote the second case, offering good quality sound-material. For using it in your electroacoustical compositions, to find inspirating moments for your instrumental-compositions.
there are composers who "use" the folk-music, overtaking melody lines, whole pieces instead of making there own decisions, and pouring out their own musical ideas.