Periphery as an autonomous space for experimentation in music and education in Southern Hungary
Published December, 2024
by András Simongáti-Farquhar
In the south of Hungary, 30 km from the Croatian border, in a former mining town, with uniquely diverse ethnic, religious and industrial heritage is where you will find Hungary’s oldest experimental electronic music and media arts university department.
If its geographic and historical specificity wasn’t interesting enough, this small department which is at the intersection of many different paradigms and, against all odds, has managed to maintain its ethos of modernity and subversiveness. It has strong roots in Central-East European Cold War avant-garde, but this doesn’t prevent it from uniquely and naturally embracing entertainment dance music, allowing it to be a vibrant and integral part of the Pécs experimental musical underground scene. At the same time, the department which is part of University of Pécs, colloquially called the very aptly barely pronounceable EZMBA, is balancing on a fragile but all the more exciting and fruitful collision of experimentation and institutionalized music education.
Geo-historical context
An important aspect that allowed EZMBA to pursue its idiosyncratic aesthetic, artistic, and educational trajectory is its perceived provincial location in Hungary. Pécs is considered a provincial town by most Budapest elites, despite its long history as a university city with a rich cultural history. I talked to several former and recent staff and alumni who told me that this peripheral position however created an opportunity for the Pécs art scene in general, but also EZMBA, to grow in its own artistic direction independent from Budapest and find its own path to create a uniquely Pécs school of artistic expression, be it sound, visual arts or new media.
Geographical factors were coupled with favourable cultural policies of recent Hungarian history. Pécs enjoyed special artistic investment for decades from György Aczél, the most influential figure in pre-1989 Hungarian culture politics. This greatly contributed to the relative openness and support for new forms of artistic expression compared to most other non-Budapest cities. For example, Pécs has an unusually high density of modern and contemporary art museums. This perhaps is a logical response to Pécs being a hotbed for internationally renowned artists of all creeds such as Béla Tarr, Marcel Breuer, Victor Vasarely, Ilona Keserű, all born in Pécs.
The city also has an incredibly multilayered history. In a nutshell, Pécs was under Ottoman occupation in the 16th-17th centuries leaving a remarkable Muslim heritage and history behind, which is still tangible today. Starting from the 18th century, during the Habsburg occupation, coal mining was a key activity in the area. During Soviet occupation, uranium extraction started as well in the late 1950s’ which drew thousands of workers and their families to Pécs from all over Hungary. In fact, Pécs has an ethnically rich history as well. Just to name a few, prominent Boyash communities — a Romani ethnic group who speak archaic dialects of Romanian — live in the area, who possibly fled from slavery in Romania; Danubian Swabians, whose arrival can be associated with coal mining, Croats whose majority came fleeing the Yugoslav War.
A brief history of the department
What ended up being the Electronic Music and Media Department in 2010, initially started out as an elective course in 1994. The initial impetus to its establishment happened due to very lucky confluences of events and contexts. The relative openness of Pécs pre-1989, coupled with the increased freedom, flexibility and excited curiosity of the period after the Fall of the Iron Curtain made changes in Hungarian institutions of higher education possible.
Ilona Keserű, one of the most important Hungarian painters of our time, was invited at the time to establish a visual arts department in Pécs. She agreed on the condition that her husband, László Vidovszky, could join her as well and be given opportunities to teach and establish composition related educational units at Pécs University. He happened to be also one of the most influential Hungarian contemporary composers, a member of the legendary “Új Zenei Stúdió” (“New Music Studio”).
At the tail end of the Croatian War of Independence, as part of the Yugoslav War, which was raging some 30km away from Pécs, Vidovszky approached Andrea Szigetvári, composer and researcher of computer music, who is currently associate professor of electroacoustic composition at the Liszt Academy, Budapest. Szigetvári was asked to start the elective class just after she had come back from several study trips and residency programs where she worked together with Max Matthews, Charles Dodge and John Chowning. Szigetvári was a perfect, if not the only, choice for such a task. A graduate of Chopin University of Music, Warsaw, she studied as a sound engineer, but early on became passionate about the compositional usage of electronic sound equipment. At Chopin University, luckily, this was absolutely possible through the sound studio and expertise that was made available for students provided by the Polish Radio. After graduation, Szigetvári worked as a “realizator” of electroacoustic compositions at the Hungarian Radio. The “realizator” was a specific profession of the late Cold War, who had the technical and music theory skills and knowledge to help composers who lacked such knowledge to create their pieces on electronic equipment. She also worked as a sound producer and editor at the Hungarian State Record Label Company “Hungaroton”. At the same time, she had been diving into the vibrant new music scene in Budapest.
Electronic music education in Pécs seemed fundamentally experimental from its inception. From the very beginning, in terms of educational methods, professors and teachers have always tried to follow an unbeaten track. Refusing the frontal, punitive educational methods so common in Central-Eastern Europe, Szigetvári, Vidovszky, and later, other teachers, embraced an inclusive and flexible — occasionally DIY as much as the institutional context allowed it — approach based on dialogue, feedback and mutual inspiration where students were encouraged to perform in various venues, contexts, audiences, many times collaboratively. Students were also encouraged to contribute to the improvement of the course, get involved with gathering equipment and their maintenance as well as with organizing electroacoustic music events, festivals, symposia and workshops.
According to Szabolcs Keresteš — one of the earliest and most active students, currently a researcher and lecturer at the Liszt Academy of Music — the elective course was opened in 1996 to virtually any Pécs University student; not just to Voice and Choir Conductor students. This meant students from linguistics, economy, philosophy and natural sciences departments could join the Electronic Music elective course. This allowed for the course — and later the department — to have a strong interdisciplinary focus. As Keresteš pointed out, while a choir conductor would have perhaps a more grid-like approach to composition, a philosophy or economics student would prefer a more algorithmic or stochastic route to organizing sound. This cross-pollination of disciplinary backgrounds proved to be very fruitful to this day. After an intermediary period in the late-90s/00s, when the elective course grew into something called “Music Informatics” training, the Electronic Music and Media department was finally accredited in 2010. However, this was unfortunately the same year that Fidesz won the elections with an absolute majority. For the arts and culture, this also meant the start of a long-term, far-right, heavily ideologically driven state project of radically profit-oriented, neoliberal, conservative, nationalist, and racist cultural doctrine that has been meticulously repressing all forms of artistic diversity. The atmosphere of openness, experimentation and hopeful curiosity towards the unknown and anything new that characterized 80s-90s Hungary, which also allowed the opportunity to start electronic music education in Pécs, has been deliberately and systematically undermined and dismantled.
In this repressive and at moments hostile environment, the work of Balázs Kovács — a philosopher, sound artist and electronic musician and a lecturer who’s been head of the department for almost 15 years — and Andrea Szigetvári became all the more important. It is through their arduous work, perseverance, and aesthetic vision that EZMBA retained its distinctive character as a space for open and collaborative sonic explorations, unconventional compositional methods and instrument-building.
“The department was an outsider with a sense of autonomy and own identity. It didn’t try to legitimize itself. This is something I could strongly relate to since an early age.”. Irrespective of age or background, many of those I spoke to all pointed to EZMBA’s inclusivity in terms of the application process, while maintaining university standards. As a former EZMBA student, Gábor Lázár — a renowned electronic music artist, producer and performer — pointed out that what mattered was your portfolio, what your visions were, and what your creative process and way of thinking rather than a forced academic knowledge. In this way, applicants didn’t necessarily need an institutional educational background, so that young adults who didn’t have the resources to access institutional music education and who were also creative, ambitious and talented could join the programme. Lázár also told me that it was very encouraging that faculty consisting of researchers, sound engineers and composers took you seriously as an applicant, regardless of your level of music education and knowledge. The resulting diversity is clearly noticeable in the current student body as well as among alumni.
Former students
“You have no idea how much EZMBA meant for me!”. Flaviu Ciocan made his name as a trailer composer for Hollywood blockbusters and also as a sound designer who specializes in cinematic audio. He’s also responsible for sound mapping for iMapp, the monumental video mapping show in Bucharest, Romania. He said that getting accepted and studying at EZMBA and becoming a first generation university graduate in his family, the department was a huge eye-opener for him on the multiple ways sound can be produced, organized and mapped into a potential audiovisual experience. He told me that his studies were very influential in his professional career later on and he still uses some of the concepts, methods, and strategies he learned at the department.
“One of my works there was a piece that used granular synthesis, where I was drawing on foil with the mouse that controlled different parameters of sound.”. Diána Bóbics, who joined the elective course in the late 90s is now a lecturer at the Painting department of the Faculty of Music and Visual Arts at Pécs University, while being an interdisciplinary fine artist working with different art forms such as sound installations. She told me that for her the connection of sound and visuality has always been important throughout her career. Even though her recent work focuses mainly on painting she made several works on the concept of visual acoustics but, in her recent graffiti works, I also feel a strong sense of rhythmicality.
“A distinctive Pécs School of music seems to be emerging. When you hear someone perform you get the feeling that they probably studied at EZMBA.”. Gida Labus, a former student of EZMBA is now a musician, composer, video and performance artist exposing hidden, non-human events in nature and urban areas. They also teach video art and multimedia-performance at the department since 2016. According to them, the strong sense of community is what makes EZMBA so unique, creating a characteristic and stable cultural microclimate. With some of their colleagues, Labus co-founded the successful event series called 143° that provides an opportunity for EZMBA students and alumni to perform in several locations.
Looking at these testimonies and the historical development of the department, EZMBA at Pécs University seems to be an example of how the periphery can be an opportunity for nurturing a rich and vibrant cultural field and also a place of autonomy because it can develop according to its own dynamics, interests and context.
Text by András Simongáti-Farquhar
Photos Balázs Kovács, Zita Matulányi-Szabó (@para.zita)
This article is brought to you as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthen the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.