Schroeder's death

A musical expedition to Hungary in the 70s by DieOrdnungDerDinge

with works from the Ùj Zenei Stúdió

The “Studio for New Music” (Új Zenei Stúdió), founded in 1970 in Budapest, saw themselves as the Hungarian equivalent of the european and, in particular, American avant-garde of the time. Their aim was to promote in Hungary the progressive new music that was developed after the second world war (Cage/ Reich/Stockhausen/Boulez) as well as provide a platform for the innovative compositions of Hungarian composers that wanted to free themselves from the dominant compositional traditions.
The collective search for new musical ideals and a new artistic mindset made the Új Zenei Stúdió one of the most important movements of the alternative art scene in Hungary at that time. Because of this they were suspiciously watched and spied upon by the repressive political regime.
Interestingly, if not ironically, many of the compositions that were deemed by the political system to be dangerous, were themselves built using the strictest systems (serial music, numeric systems) allowing the interpreter almost no room for artistic freedom.

Together with the Hungarian composer Samu Gryllus, DieOrdnungDerDinge create a concert collage with László Vidovszky’s “Schroeder’s Death” for pianist and three assistants as its centrepiece. This work is made up of an endless sequence of slightly varying chromatic scales. The assistants, following precise time codes, gradually prepare the strings inside the piano, at first altering the sounds and finally, little by little, silencing the piano.
Narrative material was provided by interviews with former members of the Ùj Zenei Stúdió and contemporary documents (e.g. only recently released spies’ reports about cultural events).