About the Composer

Well, all the Budapest bloggers are sharing this little YouTube item, so I figured what the heck….

Despite the truly terrible music heard here, this video combines my two favorite things: Budapest and weird languages. It’s a Mongolian music video shot for some reason in Budapest. I can make out enough Cyrillic to tell that the title has the word “Budapest” in it.

Who knew Mongolia was turning out music videos? Anyway, there are some lovely shots of Budapest (and some not so lovely), and the language is certainly interesting to listen to, if you can stomach the music.

P.S. - Yes! The payphones in Budapest are all pink, since Deutche Telekom a.k.a T-Mobile owns a big stake in the former state telephone company.

P.P.S. - Stick with it, because it get’s really silly in the last ten seconds. (OK, not fair: If I understood the lyrics it might make perfect sense.)

Roger Bourland recently linked to a video of the Bulgarian State Women’s Chorus, which reminded me of my latent obsession with Bulgarian folk music. Check it out, (and read the comments for your daily dose of surrealism).

Years ago, during a very short stint as the vocal director of a folk ensemble, I had the pleasure of preparing that first song in the video, which is called “Ergen Deda”. The rhythm of the piece is a fast 7/8 Šopska dance (from the Šop region of Bulgaria; Šopska is also a tasty salad).

These 7/8 dances are so fast that the notion of “7/8″ fails to really capture it. It’s really just a matter of “short-short-long”. In Bulgarian (and Greek and other Balkan) music all kinds of interesting combinations of “short” and “long” are used, and we’re forced to notate them with awkward 11’s and 13’s.

See if you can figure this one out:

You can see why I love this stuff, right? If you listen to the end, it gets faster and becomes increasingly difficult to turn off.

Here’s a great trove of other examples you can hear online.

To really appreciate this music, you need to see it danced. Found this for you. If you don’t watch the whole thing, at least let it load and skip to the end. There’s always a wild finish in these presentations.

P.S. - Poking around on YouTube for Bulgarian stuff, I found this travel pitch for Bulgaria, which despite the lady’s weird Bulgaro-Surrey accent has me contemplating summer vacation 2008.

P.P.S. - I managed to sneak a Bulgarian(ish) 7/8 into the coda of Letter To Hungary (try excerpt #2), but it’s all right; sometimes Hungarian music gets into this rhythmic territory.

One of my earliest pieces, American Standard for clarinet and piano, is included on an upcoming CD of American works for clarinet and piano on the British label Clarinet Classics.

Performing on the recording are clarinettist Peter Furniss and pianist David Leiher Jones, both good friends since our Budapest Liszt Academy days a really long time ago. (They taught me all about Marmite and how to curse properly in English.) American Standard was originally written for Peter, who’s performed it numerous times around the world.

The disc also includes a magnificent performance of the Bernstein Sonata as well as works by Victor Babin, James Cohn, Robert Muczynski and Richard Dudas, another Budapest cohort.

The release is scheduled for June, and I will, no doubt, crow about it again here at that time.