Laszlo Horvath in Connecticut (2019-2020)
My Senior Thesis project at The Cooper Union School of Art, Laszlo Horvath in Connecticut is an audiovisual album that combines music, text, narration, and video to construct a loose narrative about walking through the state of Connecticut towards New York City. Its protagonist, a fictional version of myself, navigates a contemporary landscape of suburbs, forests flanked by highways, and the occasional site of colonial ruins, slowly losing grip on his own temporality.
In Connecticut uses clashing aesthetic lexicons to decenter the authority of narrative and point to the erosion of stable geographical signifiers. New England, the video’s object of concern, has rich and complicated histories of artistic and philosophical movements’ exhumation and sensationalization of the American past through the lens of the present. The fictive Laszlo Horvath present in this video invokes 19th century Romantic figures, rambling in the unkempt commons, removed from industrialized society, waxing on utopian sentiments towards the abundant natural landscape.
Narrowly escaping the frame of this idyll, however, are the contingencies of the contemporary: reactionary politics, populism, and dwindling middle class economies abandoned by privatized financial sectors of major cities. As this world slowly bleeds into the picture, the fantasy of identity formation exempt from a Neoliberal subjecthood shuts down.
In Connecticut examines the through-lines between genres of mass consumption and the obscure music of early American songbooks. Sonic palettes of radio R’n’B and 2000s boy band vocals mingle with warbling 18th century fifes and voices recalling the incantations of New England psalmody. I recorded the vocals phrase by phrase and stitched them together to create absurd speeds of delivery, and left room-noise in the takes to create flickering transparencies of space. This project also marks my foray into sampling my own voice, creating a polyphonic instrument susceptible to each sung note’s fallibility. The result is a tapestry of tone-colors that sound at once acoustic and processed, sincere and oblique in attitude. The effect is an experience that allows for relative familiarity and enjoyment while enabling a state of historical consciousness and negotiation with contrivance.
Completed during the COVID-19 pandemic, In Connecticut resonates with the isolationism, paranoia, and deluge of media intake in the aftermath of lockdown. The work is both a mediation on and product of media ecologies, having been constructed from multiple sources of video footage across DSLR camera, iPhone, and still photography, as well as audio recordings made through studio equipment along with field recordings and Voice Memos. The variety of captured content to weave together a narrative reflects the state of fragmented knowledge production that marks the post-pandemic era. Laszlo Horvath in Connecticut was an inflection point in my own development, debuting in 2020 as I left undergrad into an ambiguous social and professional world, and likewise situating my concerns and identity as an composer.
Excerpts:
Laszlo and the Hidden Strength (2018-2023)
Laszlo and the Hidden Strength was a folk-rock ensemble I assembled and fronted beginning in college. The lineup rotated over the years, consisting variably of vocals, guitar, drum kit, piano, saxophone, keyboards, and violin. Initiated with jazz musicians I originally met in high school, the ensemble served as a vehicle for performing songs that I wrote on guitar and piano. Hidden Strength was not only a key opportunity for me to teach myself arrangement and transposition across a range of instruments; it was also a crucial course in learning how to convey musical ideas to other musicians, lead rehearsals, organize amplified sound in venues of different scales, and be an effective listener in an ensemble setting. Over the course of these years we released three albums, toured, and gigged in New York City extensively.
I wrote our last album, Strange Victory, amidst the 2020 pandemic during lockdown. Spending much of the pandemic in Upstate New York, the work gravitated away from the paucity of our tight, direct first two efforts, and leaned into meditations on landscape, incidental communities, and solitude. We recorded these songs in a house belonging to my bandmate’s family which was set to be demolished, allowing us to set up microphones and stage recording space in a way that reoriented the setting of the home into a site of experimentation, tracking live in bedrooms, bathrooms and attics.
When we completed the record, I wanted to recreate these compositions live in a way that gave shape to the feeling of recording these songs in situ instead of recreating the exact end product of the album. I decided for our album release show, I would arrange the parts for cello, violin, viola, piano, flute, and clarinet. I assembled instrumentalists for this small chamber ensemble over social media and through mutual friends. I found a space, Pageant, that normally showcased dance but agreed to house us, and we set a performance date.
Having never composed for live orchestral instruments before, the experience of versioning these songs for a chamber ensemble was a pivotal moment in my education. The months leading to the performance consisted of intensive rehearsal sessions with each musician as I learned the physicalities and quirks of their instruments, and styled my compositions accordingly. I would compose, present to the musicians, and revise the parts adjusting to what I heard with such frequency that the process of writing and rehearsing became one in the same. I developed a nascent consciousness of composition as a practice dealing with space, materiality, and choreographies between musicians. Through dealing closely with the performances of these songs translated through new sounds, I was able to recover the essence of their original construction.
This experience was crucial in deciding that I wanted to pursue composition in an academic setting. Although I felt accomplished in this endeavor, more than anything it made me hungry to continue composing with and for ensembles, and to establish conditions under which creative dialogues can produce work that takes on a life of its own.
Strange Victory Release Show, 2023, Pageant, Brooklyn.
Pelts (2022)
Pelts is a collection of pieces built from samples of a grand piano I inherited from my aunt after she passed. I grew up with this piano—it was the first tool I used to discover chords and tonal relationships. Over the length of a day I recorded every key at every possible velocity with and without sustain and plucked every string under the hood to the same effects until I had felt I captured its total acoustic signature, its aura. I was interested in sampling the piano to preserve every potential sound it could make in disembodied form so that I might have access to it wherever I could use a laptop.
My intention was to keep a perfect aural image of the instrument, both for sentimental and practical purposes. Instead, I was drawn to the artifice produced by the system in which the authenticity of the piano was captured. Now diagrammed in all of its possibilities on my computer, my late aunt’s grand piano was only a unifying symbol, its parts entirely atomized and malleable to digital protocols. The processing between raw material and packaged good—i.e. the acoustic sound of each pitch and its recorded trace—whitewashed the alienation between my intimate relationship with the real piano and my mechanized deployment of its sounds as tools to create a recorded musical commodity. I thought how the technology of this process reflected historical and economic conditions that similarly hid violence inherent in extractive practices. I remembered the first of these practices I learned of in elementary school, the North American fur trade, and the establishment of New Amsterdam (eventually New York City) originally to function as an outpost of it.
I mused on my extracted piano samples as “pelts”, the abstracted products of an ecological network of relations to be sold, shaped, and circulated in an economy. The allegory is imperfect—I do not equate the meaning of my aunt’s piano in its corner of a house in New Jersey sampled for sounds to be played on streaming services to that of the natural resources of North America ruthlessly colonized by white Europeans for trade and empire expansion—rather, I meant to examine how music—as a commodity—internalizes and potentially resists the subjectivity produced by its economic contingencies, and how I want my own work to fit into this negotiation. On the album cover is my white face covered in white paint, an image relating my own identity as a product of the history of naturalizing forces of whiteness and coloniality to the ways Pelts interrogates these power structures in its formal construction.
Does sampling to recreate the intimacy of an instrument, while reducing the material into waveform, also produce an excess, traces of itself in the process? If so, where can we locate these traces, and how can we compose with them instead of in spite of them? Beyond the content of a song, what is the melancholia produced within its production?
Other Recent Works (2023-2024)
The following recordings constitute other works from the past two years that fall outside of the frame of the projects above. Recently, I have been working on compositions of simple dualities involving vocal sample libraries and strings, experiments with the tactile and temporal manipulation of tape machines, writing for acoustic/synthetic hybrid ensembles, and using the song form to explore non-representational and acousmatic sound production incorporating narrativity.
I am pushing my compositional practice to become more social, aleatory, and material-specific. Spending much of the last decade making visual art in college and dealing with music through the approach of songwriting, I have always been interested in the problems of representational and illustrative functions of music, specifically how musical narrativity begets hierarchies between language, articulation, and performance. At Princeton, I will challenge the abstraction of these functions of music by composing closely with and for other musicians, and using the physical materials of instruments as inspiration to compose and experiment from rather than following their common usage. These recordings reflect those concerns, while also dealing with equivocal tunings, playing deceitfully with the acoustic/digital spectrum, and deploying feedback as lyrical expression.
Study for Voice and Strings, 2024 (sampled voice, violin)
Tape Pulse, 2024 (sampled violin, tape machine, reverb, amplifier)
Inner Game, 2024 (voice, sampled voice, VST grand piano, violin, acoustic guitar, cello, processing)