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Joined: March 04 2008
Location: Retirement Home
Status: Offline
Points: 3658
Topic: Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer Posted: November 27 2011 at 14:27
Born in 1963 in Novi Sad, Vojvodina (ex-Yugoslavia) as part of the Hungarian minority there, Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer currently lives and works in France (since 1991). He studied piano and double bass and then continued to composition studies in the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad as a student of Rudolf Brucci and went on to The Hague in the Netherlands to complete these studies where he graduated with fellow composers Louis Andriessen and Diderick Wagenaar.
In 1986, during his studies, he established his ensemble called Tickmayer Formatio, where he mingled his classical training with jazz and avant-rock. This group was active until 2001.
Your
biography has been covered in your ProgArchives profile so let's
bypass the biography details. We will also end up with a pretty
thick book if we goes through everything you have been involved in. A
book I hope you one day will write. So we have to be selective and
only talk about your albums listed in ProgArchives and personal
things. How was it to grow up in Novi Sad during the Tito era and how
much did that influence your music ?
Actually the book is
already written, but in that manuscript (not yet published) I am not
talking much about myself, I was rather more concentrated on the
things that happened around me (and doing this, probably I was also
telling much about myself in a more indirect way). The book ends with
the outburst of the war; I was really trying to escape the well
paying formula of the “victim”: such a commonplace, very often
employed by artists who never had whichever problem in the country.
Most of them used the fact of coming from ex-Yugoslavia as a golden
opportunity, where their background served as a great “career”
starter in Western lands. In a certain way we were all victims, but I
– just as many other artists - was far from suffering directly as
unfortunately many did on the battlefields, concentration camps or
other of many crime scenes. To answer your question, I
shall try to give you a bit wider picture of the country and my
hometown of my youth. Probably the younger generation is not really
accustomed with the history of that country (well, finally it ceased
to exist) but one should know that it was a very special one back in
Tito’s days, when the political map of the whole world was a very
different one. We are speaking here about the period of Cold War,
where the probability of the outburst of a new devastating and
probably nuclear confrontation - between the US and USSR - was on the
every day’s menu. In that context Yugoslavia had a very special
status: close to communism but far from Kremlin, ogling with the West
(especially with US and UK), getting huge loans from the latter
countries (and others) and giving away massive amounts for the help
of the so called Non-Alignment Movement which was Tito’s
brainchild. The “well fare state” and the “not so well fare
state” periods succeeded each other often abruptly, changing
immediately the cultural policy as well. Artists and writers had much
liberty (well, not enormously) than their colleagues stacked in the
countries of the Warsaw Pact, just because the Yugoslav Communist
Party wanted to show to the world how that country was more open,
prosper and human than those controlled by KGB’s criminals,
although, much less openly they often employed more or less the same
procedures as the Soviet secret police did. In that sense, even in
the eighties – when it was clear that the system is over - some
artists were imprisoned if they were misunderstood by the authorities
or their work contained a hidden political disagreement. Of course,
this was the dark side of the moon of the secret police (so called
UDBA), and information on these cases didn’t leak out at all,
especially not outside the country borders. Yugoslavia was built
in 1918 on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian (the north and the
western part of the country: Slovenia, Croatia and Vojvodina) and the
Ottoman Empire (more or less the rest: Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro and
Macedonia) and it was constantly drenched into contradictions
(ethnic, religious, political and class) that finally led the country
to a two collapses (1939 and 1991). Before the World War II, while
the country was bourgeois, all avant-garde tendencies were treated as
left orientated and consequently condemned to a marginal status.
After the World War II, when the country became socialist (and
communist as well) the avant-gardes were treated as an extreme of the
Western bourgeois decadence. The year when I was born (1963) was
marked by Tito’s crusade and condemnation of avant-garde tendencies
and since that moment, the political power had a ambiguous
relationship with all new tendencies in art, music literature and
philosophy. Jazz musicians – although not avant-gardes - had
also a kind of difficult starting point during the first years of the
after World War II period. Until 1948, Tito was an allies and a good
friend of Stalin, and Moscow feared everything that had a decadent
Western taste. Luckily the love affaire between YU and USSR ended in
1948, when Tito said a historical “NO” to Stalin (that started
the so called Informbiro period in the country) and risked a huge
military escalation (US Army was in a maximum state of alert just as
the USSR Army and their satellites, already positioned on the
Hungarian-Yugoslavian border). This put the end of the Zhdanov
doctrine and aesthetics (although the street in Belgrade which bears
his name, was never changed – sounds again quite contradictory) and
let some fresh air in the cultural life (although still well
controlled). But I am not going to tell you the whole history of the
cultural life of the country here but rather concentrate on things I
can recall. I started to listen to rock and soon after that to
the jazz and jazz-rock music, quite early on. Those early teenager
days coincided with the probably most flourish years of the history
of country (we are speaking here about the seventies). That was a
period when in the country a bunch of state controlled record
companies existed: actually almost every republic - as the state had
six of them, plus two autonomous provinces – had at least one big
company (as Jugoton and Suzy in Zagreb/Croatia, PGP
RTB in Belgrade/Serbia, Diskoton in Sarajevo/Bosnia, ZKP
RTLJ Ljubljana/Slovenia, etc.). The quality and the catalogue of
those (and other) companies were clearly inferior of those coming out
from Western record plants, but from time to time, we got some
substantial vinyl releases of the groups or personalities from
abroad. Useless to say, as soon as you were interested in a more
underground or alternative music, your only choice was to get those
titles from the West and that was quite complicated and expensive.
Here are some progressive names of those days I can recall that were
licensed to and published by some of the before mentioned publishers:
many of main titles from the seventies of the groups as Led Zeppelin,
Deep Purple, David Bowie, ELP, YES, Genesis, Jethro Tull, etc (this
list of course is not exhaustive). Also some of the main titles in
the field of jazz-rock of the same period, groups as: Mahavishnu,
Return to Forever, Herbie Hancock, Billy Cobham, The Crusaders and
alike. And finally speaking of the 70’s, some punk and new wave
acts as well: Sex Pistols, Clash, Damned, B52, XTC, PiL, Devo, etc.
In any case, that wasn’t huge but at least something. However,
classical music was poorly covered and the records with new
tendencies of those days, with the exception of few records of
domestic composers – mainly from Croatia – didn’t exist at all.
I never saw Schönberg, Stockhausen or Varese in any of record shops
(that came later, in the 80’s, when a small selection of Hungarian
classical music records were imported in some of the record shops).
Paradoxically, the new music (and the good classical releases as
well) was much better covered in Hungary, the country that was
directly under the Soviet control. Same stood for music scores –
nobody published them in Yugoslavia (with the rare exception of
Composers Associations, who printed few copies of some of their
members) in the same time, Hungary had a great catalogue and
availability even of new music scores and literature. Considering
classical and jazz music Hungary – due to its great music heritage
- was always and remained superior comparing to Yugoslavia. This was
for me a godsend: as a member of Hungarian national minority, I had
no problems with all those great books and score instructions I
bought in Budapest at bargain price (life in the countries behind the
iron curtain was much cheaper than in YU). The great deal of my music
education comes from books, scores and records bought in Budapest and
from experiences of playing there during eighties with some very fine
improvisers.
Rock music (along with some prog-rock,
jazz-rock and punk-rock industrial-rock acts) was without any doubt
the best music that Yugoslavia ever had. I have a kind of very
personal theory about that: in my opinion, as the country was a new
one (founded in 1918 with the unification of three major
ethnicities), things that are usually based on a long tradition (as
classical music, painting, philosophy or even literature) never
really flourished in that young and in many aspects artificial
country as there weren’t much to build on. A long and continuous
tradition was clearly missing, the situation was especially a chaotic
in literature, as the common language, the so called Serbo-Croatian
failed to impose itself. However, the rather fresh artistic
disciplines as film, conceptual art or rock music gave far better
results. To be honest, back to those days, I wasn’t really
crazy about neither domestic rock nor jazz music scene; the interest
came post-festum, after I left the country, although it was
more in a documentary sense than the artistic one. Today when I look
back, I have to say that the rock scene was a much more stimulating
than any jazz one. Few interesting groups existed back to those days
as: Time (from Zagreb/Croatia) with their really good first -
the white - album, Korni Grupa (from Belgrade/Serbia) a very
controversial band that was capable to put out a double album built
on a Middle of the Road pop songs (LP one) and some sympho and
jazz rock mixture very close to the language of Soft Machine
(LP two). There was also a bunch of interesting groups from Slovenia
as: September (complex rock music with lot of jazz-rock
influences) Buldožer (was a very much Frank Zappa influenced
rock happening concept), Sončna Pot (the completely forgotten
and definitely the best jazz-rock band of the ex-country), the great
Begnagrad (the first RIO and the best group in all ex-YU –
at least for me) and finally the first punk acts in the country, the
group called Pankrti (whose first album I really loved in my
teenager days) and of course the world renowned Laibach. The
so called, folk rock scene – which always represented the YU rock
establishment– never affected me in the slightest, as it basically
dealt with the kitschy, new tradition of folk music heavily based on
Turkish melismatic patterns, a very popular style of nowadays Serbia
and Croatia as well. Again, another paradox situation: besides hating
each other, Serbs and Croats always considered Muslims as their
biggest enemies. As I mentioned above, my way was a quite
different one and that is probably one of the reasons that I always
stood in a gloomy shadow of that country’s music scene. Back to
those days, the domestic rock music scene never gave me enough
satisfaction: I was searching for something considerably more
experimental (finally, I did that with The Science Group much
later) and the jazz one was even less inspiring. I was still very
young when I heard for the first time the father figure of Hungarian
free jazz music, deeply rooted in Bartók’s style and the Hungarian
ethnic music of the old tradition, György Szabados, who was – and
still is – my biggest influence on my free improvisational style
and procedure. Actually, although I have – another paradox – more
references in the prog rock world, probably due to my compositions
for The Science Group and the collaboration of some musicians
from that scene, as a musician, I spent a far more time in the world
of free improvisation (I never played publicly classical jazz music,
although I like it very much). The concerts of Szabados’ formations
and especially his solo piano music showed me the path and definitely
reaffirmed something I was already guessing but wasn’t sure of:
that there is still left much to build on Bartókian (and most
broadly speaking on the old tradition of Carpathian and Balkan
regions), on the language(s) which is our mother tongue (it was quite
often rejected by the represents of the avant-garde composers of
60’s). My biggest concern with the Yugoslavian music scene in
general was a lack of originality and deeper roots – as a new
country which desperately tried to show and prove its
internationalism, it was rather under the influences of
Anglo-American music or under the aforementioned kitschy folk music
of new tradition (something that Bartók strictly rejected).
You
moved to France. Why France ?
Completely by chance, in
fact I was supposed to work with the choreographer Josef Nadj who
eventually invited me to France. He was based in Orleans with his
dance group so, this is the shortest version of the story how I
landed in the city where I still do live. Otherwise, before coming to
this country I didn’t have a slightest contact with it, especially
not in the field of music and culture. I was studying in Holland
before arriving here, and probably I would try to settle down there
or in Hungary after the outburst of the civil war in ex-Yugoslavia,
where I refused to be mobilized by Milosevic’s killing machinery.
As the job with the dance group seemed an interesting and a promising
one, finally I did choose that option. Honestly, today I am not
really sure whether I did the right thing. France is a closed society
in every possible meaning of that word, and that affects much the
country’s cultural life as well. French people doesn’t really
communicate with the world and they still think that everybody should
speak their language, as it is “the nicest” one. Consequently,
they can hardly speak any other languages and establish a real
communication and intellectual exchange on an international level
(well this is well known) so, they rather opt for a cultural
incarceration within national boundaries. This inevitably leads to
the cultural provincialism characterized by a hard, desperately
romantic and anachronistic cultural nationalism (e.g. recently I
heard that the French jazz is the best on this planet!?!? in fact,
every French product is the best on this planet) where, if you not
aligned with this kind of thinking and cultural imprisonment, many
doors remain closed forever. There is nothing bad to love your
country, language and culture, but when in that cultural landscape
there is no place for anything else, one should really start to ring
the alarm bells.
This
is an archive based interview also intended for the fans you get well
after both you and I have passed away so let's go straight to your
albums. Please give us your views/some words on your albums, starting
with.......
Monumentomanija
Maleroznog Prvoborca from 1987
Well,
this is a kind of bootleg recording (although not a harmful one, as
it was recorded and distributed by people I know) of the concert
played at the jazz festival in my hometown (Novi Sad). The title is
also a kind of bootleg – I would never give a title like this,
especially as it is a very murky one. By the way, in the same period
there was another – double cassette – release, entitled
Intellectual Cabaret/Résumé 1984-86, a concert recording
made in duo with the Formatio drummer, the late Djordje Delibašić
(1965-2005). This is the recording of the biggest
formation I ever had. If I remember well, we were eighteen at the end
of the concert, when the basic formation of four musicians
(improvisers) was enlarged by a dozen of classical musicians. This
was a period when I tried to make a synthesis between strictly
composed parts with free improvised passages. Problems arose when
classical musicians (who were employed along with free improvisers
and prog, or if you wish art rock musicians) faced the improvise
parts of compositions, and became speechless as basically nobody was
able to improvise among them. For that reason I always included in my
scores controlled aleatoric elements (the technique developed by
Witold Lutoslawski and the other Polish composers from the 60’s)
and with that, I somehow blended classical players into free
improvisation. The performance of the last and the longest piece
sounded pretty impressive, as the musicians were placed in the vast
entrance hall of the concert venue. The group of eighteen players -
positioned in the middle of that hall - had a large benefit of the
hall’s huge reverb and an effect of the “spatialisation” was a
really powerful one. You can’t hear much of that on the cassette
release as the concert was recorded with a small Walkman of those
days; therefore the overall sound quality is pretty bad and important
nuances completely inaudible. The composition ended with a repetitive
kind of dense cluster, particularly dominant in those acoustic
circumstances. A friend of my told me after the concert, that the
ending of the composition had the frightening effect comparable with
the scene from the film Come and See of Elem Klimov, most
precisely the scene when the Nazis burned down the church with the
enclosed poor civilians.
Moments
to Delight / Urban Music from 1988
This
album contains a pretty much same line up, venue and esthetical and
compositional procedure as the previous one. Moments To Delight
is again a live recording (the only recording of mine that included
two drummers) and Urban Music is a studio recording. There are
a lot of things missing here, both in instrumental and compositional
sense as well, as we were extremely limited with rehearsing and
studio hours. Saxophonists as Dresch and Grencsó or the drummer
Geröly, came from Budapest few days before concerts and they didn’t
have much opportunities or time to work together with my group.
However, back to those days, I travelled a lot to Budapest and played
much with all those guys, so somehow I did belong to that new jazz
scene from the eighties. Apart from all the imperfectness, I still
do like all those recordings, reminds of a period when I was
searching for something that I couldn’t really rationally explain
nor completely achieve. In that sense, that was a kind of experiment
with totally unforeseeable results.
Spes
from 1988
Again a concert recording (same venue, the
Studio M of Radio Novi Sad) of my very first solo piano recital I
gave in my life. The concert program was a bit longer (some twenty
minutes plus) but with the technology of those days, we had to
respect the physical limits of the vinyl record. To be honest, I was
never interested to publish this recording, as I thought it contains
many holes (well, this was my first attempt in the world of soloing),
but that concert was a special one in the eyes of many people, as it
was probably the very first kind of fusion between contemporary
composed music, free improvisation, ethnic music and some hidden rock
elements as well in that part of the world. In any case, it was a
first solo piano vinyl record of that kind in ex-Yugoslavia. After
the release of it, I got a lot of positive feedback, and people still
likes the youthful energy and the positive sounding of those
compositions/improvisations. It is a pity that nobody in the West
(where I sent a bunch of these records) wasn’t interested in it, so
it still stays as my sole solo recording release (actually, I am
preparing a “25 years later” one). Back to those days, that part
of the world was still considered culturally as an inferior margin.
When the West emptied itself and the fresh blood was urgently needed,
all of sudden, those regions became (especially with the war)
attractive, so even in New York you have bands who mix Balkan music
into their stuff (well, this always results with a worst trash, as
only the surface is integrated in, without the basic understanding of
the culture they have borrowed or plundered).
Comedia
Tempio from 1991
Wilhelm Dances from 1993
I put them
together as both represents the same body of the work: these two CD’s
contains recordings of compositions I made for the dance company of
Josef Nadj. I wasn’t much involved in incidental music writing in
my life, therefore these CD’s represent a half of my “stage-music”
output. This was a kind of intermediate period in my life, when I
casted away the idea to mix musicians of different background
together, as well as to try to incorporate free improvisation into a
strictly composed body of work. Most of that music is consciously
simple, basic and melodic (but not tonal in a sense of functional
tonality) and bears a character of background music, although those
compositions embed some interesting ideas as well.
Repetitive
Selective Removal of One Protecting Group from 2005 Cold Peace
Counterpoints from 2008
I
put those together as well, as they are incarnating a pretty same
aesthetic world. Your readers are going to find much detailed
information about these releases on my website, but let me underline
here that these releases conclude a long period (almost ten years) in
my creative solitude, when I employed and used a whole arsenal of new
technologies in my compositions. That took me a considerable time as
I wanted to go deep in that new world of possibilities. From the very
beginning it was clear to me, that first I should really find out
“what exactly I want to make with endless possibilities of the
technology, otherwise I am lost and stacked in the jungle of great
possibilities”. This led me so far, that in the certain moment I
enrolled computer science studies, but – luckily – I realized
that I don’t believe in scientific concepts in music and art in
general (here I have to note that science was never a strange subject
for me, and I am still much interested in many topics). In the same
time, I was interested in pushing the limits of the machines and not
to make them sounding human (this concept is especially omnipresent
on “Repetitive Selective Removal…”). As a player, I am
much more present on the second one, and probably the third (as these
albums are imagined as a first two of a trilogy) will involve just a
tiny bit of technology and lot of piano playing.
How
is the availability of your albums?
I
think you can still get almost all of those titles through ReR
Megacorp with the exception of the cassette and Comedia Tempio. (I
still have about 20-30 copies left of the latter, if there are
somebody is interested in it, one can freely e-mail me and purchase a
copy of it).
Some
of these albums are released as Tickmayer Formatio. Is the approach
to the music and the end result different with Tickmayer Formatio
than on the albums released under your own name ?
Tickmayer
Formatio was the name of my group that ended in 2001 (lasted for 15
years). From the very beginning it was clear for me that I could
never form a group with stable number members as all those projects
differed tremendously and consequently demanded different profile of
musicians. Hence the term Formatio (which - one might guess - on
Latin means formation) and no trio, quartet or whatever. It was a
formation of at least two up to – as I mentioned above – eighteen
musicians. I think you are right; the music I composed for my group
is quite different that I made myself or I composed for orchestras or
soloists in a classical sense. The group was always an experiment for
me, a laboratory where I tried out ideas without the fear that “now
I have to approve myself as a composer, otherwise the number of my
commissions are going to drop drastically”. If you are a composer,
working with your own group has many advantages (disadvantages as
well) in comparison to composers who changes customers all the time.
For
those of us unfamiliar with your music; how would you describe you
music and which bands would you compare yourself with?
This
is probably the most difficult task, as my music definitely embraces
many influences and crosses a lot of boundaries, but one thing is for
sure: I never valued music and art exclusively from the technical
point of view and the degree of “novelties” (what a stupid
aesthetical measurement) involved; and I was never a religious bigot
and adept of an exclusive technique or aesthetic. I was always much
more interested in an anthropological and ontological aspect of music
and art in general, as well as the spiritual content of the same.
Technology and technique are a great things, but not the only
important in a life of human, the old Greeks knew that very well and
had a great balance between the “heart and brain” (singing and
thinking). This is something that we lost in our blind technological
race, the one which led us to a nowadays scientific (even Einstein
found himself in a shaky position) and moral crisis (nuclear power
plants are still favored by many politicians – as scientist
couldn’t find anything better and more profitable – despite the
obvious dangers and hazardous use of nuclear energy) as well as
economical collapse (well, probably this is the most disgusting part
of today’s false morality of western democracies). As for a
comparison with other bands and music, in my life I listened to such
a huge number of different groups and individuals that I would need
few books to have enough places to mention them all. And I never had
a favorite band but rather favorite pieces of many of those bands.
But anyway, I always feel truly flattered when somebody tells me that
my music has a real East European flavor.
How
is your creative processes in your band from coming up with an idea
to it's being recorded What is the topics on your albums?
The
truth is that unfortunately I never had a real band, most of my vinyl
and CD releases were basically diverse kind of projects, and for
those I always had to gather different profile of players in that
sense I would rather say that those were a different projects. Having
a band is a very different way of dealing with music, it is much more
creative, as all the members of the group are gathered around the
group in an equal level of involvement, having one aim and deeply
interested in what they are doing. This kind of communications with
fellow musicians I had much more in situations when I played with
improvisers, and that is again a very different kind of experience. I
don’t want to say with this that in my group I never had musicians
really interested in my music, far from that, but the level of
interest and involvement of each of them differed from case to case.
And you know in a band, even if you are a composer; very often the
other members propose creative ideas and solutions. I was never a
dictatorial kind of composer and always welcomed and listened to the
ideas of other musicians. As composers, we are often dazzled and
obsessed by some fix ideas, and often we are not really aware that we
are trapped and lost in some blind alleys. It was very interesting to
work with Chris Cutler, Bob Drake and the others, as although I was
the composer of all the Science Group compositions (and I wrote out
everything, you know in a classical manner), those guys came up with
plenty of very creative advices and added them freely to the composed
material. This is very different from the situation when the musician
comes to the rehearsal, reads his score and leaves the rehearsal
immediately after the last note is played, as he/she has to run to
the other rehearsal, where he/she is going to play most likely an
entirely different music (without noticing it). As for topics,
your readers will find a very detailed description of many of my
albums or compositions on my webpage.
What
is your current status and what is your plans for the rest of this
year and next year ?
I am trying to play more live concerts
and in the same time I warmed up collaboration with old musician
partners as Boris Kovač with whom I didn’t play for twenty five
years. With Boris we assembled a quartet for improvised music called
Ultima Armonia and we shall start playing concerts next year,
at the moment we are actively rehearsing. There is also a trio –
Trio Kontraszt - with my old colleagues from Budapest:
saxophonist Grencsó István and the drummer Geröly Tamás, we
already played (after more than twenty years) in this trio line up
this summer in Hungary. Again, there are much improvisations
involved, the video recording of the concert will be soon uploaded to
my site. And finally, there is a third group I am involved with at
the moment, it is a trio with two younger French musicians: Stéphane
Decolly on bass guitar and Nicolas Larmignat on drums. With them I am
preparing a few, rather complex, heavily composed pieces of mine with
also some improvised moments in almost all of them. For the readers
of your webpage, this music is probably going to be the most
appropriate one, as they will certainly find many prog elements in
it.
To
wrap up this interview, is there anything you want to add to this
interview?
I
think I said quite enough and this time I didn’t copy-paste a
single word from my previous interviews (and that is rare) so, if
there is anybody who needs some more, he can freely take a look on my
webpage where one can find a lot of written material as well.
Joined: September 18 2005
Status: Offline
Points: 12625
Posted: November 27 2011 at 14:55
Phenomenal interview with a composer and musician I've been interested in learning more about for a long time now. I have some of his cd's (his latter material) and highly recommend them.
Joined: September 10 2005
Location: Sambation
Status: Offline
Points: 284
Posted: November 29 2011 at 07:14
I'd really like to dig in to this interesting musician releases. especially to the 'science' project. I dont know when this is going to happen (so little time... so many good music to listen to...)
Joined: March 12 2005
Location: Neurotica
Status: Offline
Points: 166183
Posted: November 29 2011 at 19:11
Great interview indeed!
Looking forward to hearing the third piece in that trilogy as well as a couple of those new/upcoming projects.
Dig me...But don't...Bury me I'm running still, I shall until, one day, I hope that I'll arrive Warning: Listening to jazz excessively can cause a laxative effect.
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