The dedication of the opus is twofold. On the one hand I wanted to commemorate the hungarian pioneer electronic composer: Iván Patachich. On the other hand I wrote it to my friend, the excellent percussionist Gábor Palotás, who is also the customer of the piece.

Formerly I read in a scientific magazine that planets and stars play music, in bigger celestial bodies the soundwaves are capable to modulate the light of the stars. This moved my fantasy and driven me to dig deeper into the territory of the music of the spheres, In no time I started gathering the sounds of planets and stars. I wrote letters to the SETI and NASA, who in a turn of mail provided me with countless radio signals transformated into hearable audio ranges. I collected samples and read about the topic for years, until once it combined and came to my mind what I wanted to do.

Böethius’s writing about the Music of the spheres, the various conjunctions of planets, moduses in what planets dominate have inspired numerous composers already. Nevertheless centuries had to elapse so with the help of our technical evolution we could grow gigantic „radioears” to ourselves and listen to the eternal music of the Cosmos. Today we can listen to the non-stop radio stream of the Universe anytime.

The first „transmission in the aether”, the first music which played was undoubtedly the Big Bang. These first soundwaves are about 52 octaves deeper than our regular musical „a” sound. Making calculations it is easily shown that this is an infinite looking period, in which one soundwave sounds only once in 200 000 years.

Modern science proved, that sound influences the same spectrum’s higher waves too, namely the light. Such as in the air on Earth soundwaves spread in the huge, compressed, excessively hot gas spheres and incandescent stars. These sounds are similar from a physical point of view to the pipes of an organ, they remind us to them. According to astronomers the sound of a star depends on a few parameter, like its age, size, extension and chemical structure.

The sound appears as the vibration of the star. I was mainly interested in residual stars , i.e. the special types of neutron stars: pulsars (really quickly rotating neutron stars, for example the period of the Crab-pulsar is 33 milliseconds) and magnetars (neutron stars with gigantic magnetic field).

I composed a bouquet out of these. Strangely it made organlike all-interval, really dense cluster. Later, to somehow make this vertiginous monster move, I used various effects. I wrote down chaotically swaying pendulum motion them thus getting an irregularly increasing and sinking yet constantly static/restless mass of sound.

The motion of the marimba is controlled by the equation of the mathematical or the physical pendulum. The really quickly increasing and sinking, small motives made out of a few sound – which are slowly altering in time – made an audible contrast with the electronic material. 

Several synthesizers, variously tuned gongs and percussions can be heard beside the  clarinets, trumpets, trombones, detuned piano and japanese mouth organs – such as the shō.

Ákos Nagy - Wailing of Pendulum (electroacoustic version)

Selection of the Miniatures 1st & 2nd books

perf: Bálint Baráth

Ákos Nagy - Autumnal vortex, Mercury drops-mercury gryphons, Iris Estampide

played by István Matuz & Bálint Baráth

Ákos Nagy - Soli(e)tude

Ákos Nagy - Recitazioni (to Ádam Kondor)

Ákos Nagy - Fodrozódások az Enceladus jegén (to Gábor Palotás)

Wailing of Pendulum & Chiaroscuro 4th version featuring Hungarian Soundpaninting Orchestra 

Gábor Palotás - marimba & percussions
Bálint Baráth - electronics
Szabolcs Keresteš - electronics
Ákos Nagy - electronics & percussions

Judit Patachich - viola
Nóra Kallay - viola da gamba
Zsuza Dóry - cello
Attila Dóra - bass clarinet
Dániel Váczi - sopranino saxophone
Máté Balogh - melodeon

Conductor Samu Gryllus
THE BLEEPING TONES [Korg Ms-20] REPRESENT THE WORD RADIOACTIVITY IN MORSE CODE 

Ákos Nagy - Soundpainting & Wailing Of Pendulum & Chiaroscuro 4th Version

Different kind of synthetic microtune scales

Zsuzsanna Aba-Nagy: harp
Zsolt Szabó: viola da gamba
Roland Szentpáli: serpent
Róbert Mandel: hurdy-gurd 

recorded/mixed by: Mihály Kádár/ Ákos Nagy
http://www.hangmunka.hu/

HOMMAGE Á ROTHKO

I’ve been searching for a long time how I could totally merge the spectrums of the acoustic instruments with the spectrums of electronic instruments. I would like to do some „Mission Impossible” thing as I am trying to handle an acoustic medium as it would be an electronic one and vice versa.

Robert Mandel found me with the idea that he and Zsuzsa Aba-Nagy wanted to widen their own-founded Geneamus Ensemble named formation which used historical instruments from Vienne and Budapest and electronic instruments together.

As I think to myself as a par excellence electronic composer because I am trying to make electronic soundings in acoustic medium I really liked the idea of mixing the electronic music with the olden instruments which are much more richer in intonation and have more colours than modern instruments.

I have been experimentalising a kind of multitimbral way of composing where the melodies are accompanied by shade voices. In this case I mean the melody as a vectorial direction and I mean the same for the tonal melody but maybe while listening to the tonal melody the listener can feel an arrival or disappointment feeling (unresolved, surprise-cadence, Neapolitan destination tone, minor edge VI, alterations, et cetera). These shade voices are the main reasons for making the unisono voices multitimbral. The multitimbrality is when there are more tones at the same time which can turn into each other back and forth. At this time the spectrum is broadened or narrowed by harmonics or inharmonics so the fluctuation is continuous.

This can be easily put with my former multilayer way of composing together, where I could get complex sound density because of the several hundreds of layers which I wanted to control afterwards. We could call it vectorial multitimbral synthesis where the oscillators and the acoustic instruments morph each other’s tone as a frequency or phase synthesis.

Ákos Nagy - Hommage á Rothko [Geneamus version]

In dem Nebel 

My greatest music experience in 2016 was when I did my usual 10 km's running in the evening in Rijeka and I heard an amazing polyphonic honking fog horn choir.
Their major-third had a faintly flashing turquoise greenish-purple colour and vertiginous pallor. Of course they didn’t try to follow any temperation (for example: just intonation), I was totally impressed even though. So much that when we arrived home to Budapest with my family I immediately started to rewrite my half done piece, In dem Nebel from the beginning and I enhanced its originally 8 minutes length to double.

The fog horn here had a trumpet-horn-trombone choir sounding which is moving in a synthetic system and ends up in a kind of tonal blur. I wrote the “fog horn” melody with Püthagoras fifth emphasizing the comma. In this case the four fifth which are build on one another results a lower major third. The fifth sound in the range (C-G-D-A-E) will always be higher than the perfect major third which are built on the first tone. I made the melody using these so called synthonic comma.

Ákos Nagy - In dem Nebel [2nd version]

Flute - Gergely Matuz
Oboe - Andrea Juhász
Clarinet - András Horn
Piano - István Szakács
& electronica - Ákos Nagy

Ákos Nagy - Cauda Pavonis (Introduzione- Thema - Intermezzo - Thema - Coda)

The piece is build up from more different audio interfaces which are based on Henri Michaux Par la voie des rythmes titled book on the one hand where the automatic writing in becoming to calligraphic art and then to very different meaning content. In case of Michaux these can always be transformed to his self-made ABC set (see H. Michaux: Alphabets/Arbres des tropiques/ Mouvements book) so in this way the drawing can become writing and writing can become drawing. I wanted to make this very interesting and only Michaux-characteristic articulation to the main organizing principle of my music.

On the other hand I wanted to emphasize the interoperability between different cultures which I was interested in as well as Michaux in his H. Michaux Idéogrammes en Chine, Ecoudar titled book – published at Bozóthegyi book publisher. So you can find Japanese, Korean and many other South East-Asian music cultures as well as European and South-American Latin traditions. It was very important for me to reflect this as a locale colorit or dialect.

If I want to word this precisely without any genre, stylistic and aesthetic notion then I would say that are the sounding-time is becoming audible. The excessively fluid and amorphous articulation and motion of this sounding-time creates the music itself.

Ákos Nagy - Par la voie des rythmes - La Déploration sur la mort'd Henri Michaux

Ákos Nagy - Papiers collés

Chiaroscuro- Isorhythm pseudo gamelan & pseudo khmer music, polyrhythmic, polytempoed, polymetric patterns 
played by Bálint Baráth

Ákos Nagy - Chiaroscuro

His art is synthetic and shows synthesizing tendency which is built from the Netherlandish polyphone tradition.
He examined Gothic and late Renaissance music, traces of which show up in his later music along with elements of Transsylvanian, Indian, Khmer, Balinese and Japenese classical culture. 
He is researching the rhythm and tone systems outside Europe.
He turns towards exploring new forms and structures, filling them up with his characteristic take on melody which origins usually from non-tempered (just intonation) systems.
His music juxtaposes solid blocks of sound that keep reprising accumulatively – a method he branded ’layering technique’.
He has been experimenting with psychoacoustic ‘tricks’ for example morfing tremolos with different tempos, phenomenon of binaural beats, low frequencies impulses (ELF-WLF), sounds of pulsars, magnetars and other radio signals from space, different spectral distortions, paradox of tritone and octave, glissando-like effects, scale illusions and Doppler-effect.  

Apart from acoustic instruments he is interested in electronic instruments, electro-acoustic music, sound synthesis, percussions and instruments which differs from European ones for example shakuhachi, hichiriki, sho, bansuri, serpent, hurdy-gurdy, viola da gamba, etc. He is preparating piano, dulcimer, viola, flute with clarinet piccolo jet which has to be put into the head of the flute.
His music is influenced by the I-II World War Avant-garde, the American experimental, the early psychedelic music, many European and outside Europe folk music and former arts.
In his pieces, he shows a penchent for mathematical series, textures arranged after priciples of variation which are substantiated with polyrhythmic, polytempoed, polymetric patterns of melody and rhythm. 

Since the years 2000, he regularly publishes articles, recensions, and other musically themed publications in various music weeklies and magazines. In 2009, he brings to life - along with four partners – a workshop for the propagation of contemporary music by the name SZIMNIA (Szimmetrikus Zenei és Írásos Műveket Népszerűsítő és Ismertető Alapítvány - Foundation for Introducing and Popularising Symmetrical Works of Music and Literature), where he also carries the role of art director and program organizer. Since May 2009. he is the editor of contemporary music program Karnevál on Civil Radio.
Since Autumn of 2013 he performs noted and improvisational electro-acoustic music with Szabolcs Kerestes and Bálint Baráth named Tri(o)KeBaNa. His music is usually performed together with the Hungarian Sound Painting Orchestra. 
In 2015 he associates with Zsuzsanna Aba-Nagy and Robert Mandel in GENEAMUS Ensemble Historical and Contemporary Music Group.

Many of his pieces have been performed in Hungary-wide for example on café Budapest in CET, in Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle Budapest), Fészek Art Club, Budapest Music Center,  International Bartók Seminar and Festival Szombathely, Aurora Modularis, Újszínház (New Theartre ) Budapest, Budapest Spring Festival, MÜPA (Glass room), Fringe Festival, Thalia Theatre, Nádor Concert Hall, Műveszetek Völgye Fesztival (Valley of Arts Festival), Művészetek és Irodalom Háza Pécs, ICA-d Dunaújváros, etc. They have been also performed abroad for example in Germany, BKA Theater Berlin, in Italy, Greece, France, Sweden and USA.   

Akos Nagy

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