22/12/2003 11.19.58
An interview with Stevan Tickmayer:

The composer and leader of the Science Group and Tickmyer Formatio...

Could you please tell us a brief history of your musical voyage (how did you fall in love with music? Which were The most important influences? the most important steps at the beginning....?)
My first contact with music was during my early childhood. My father - although a civil engineer - at that time still played a violin accompanied by my older sister on piano. At the age of seven I started to learn piano as well, but after few years I left my studies convinced that music will never interested me again. I prepared myself for a scientific carrier. Before I left my piano studies I tried to write an opera!! Very soon I discovered that I'm absolutely incapable to do this job; so I meant that I'm not suited for a musician.
After few years of listening to some sympho rock music (as King Crimson, ELP, Yes, Genesis and Gentle Giant) at the age of 14 I discovered suddenly the world of improvisation (some jazz- rock stuff as Weather Report or Herbie Hancock) & classical jazz music (O.Peterson, Armstrong, Ellington, Basie). Unexpectedly I decided to continue my music studies as I harshly regretted I abandoned my music education. As, back to those days, it wasn't possible to continue my piano lessons at the music school because of our rigorous musical education system in Yugoslavia, I switched to double bass and studied that instrument for next six years. Next to this I studied music theory at the music high school & later I studied & graduated composition under Rudolf Brucci (an dodecaphonic Croatian composer) at the "Academy Of Arts" in my hometown Novi Sad. I did my postgraduate studies in composition with Louis Andriessen & Diderick Wagenaar at "Royal Conservatory" in Den Haag. At last but not least I was the lucky one who had chances to study with Marta and Gyorgy Kurtag not only as a player but as a composer as well (what Kurtag never does) and to learn through our friendship tremendously lot. I sincerely think I wouldn’t be where I’m today without them.
Influences? There were as many as different.
Quite early I became a free jazz "freak". Without any doubt A.Braxton made an impact as well as the others: Cecil Taylor, Sam Rivers, Sun Ra, Dave Holland, Barre Phillips etc. Personally I always considered Ornette Coleman as a father figure of new American jazz music. In the same time I was very serious about European free & improvised music: Derek Bailey, Peter Kowald, Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill, John Surman etc. & especially about East Europeans: György Szabados, Tomasz Sztanko, Viaceslav Ganelin, Gütner Baby Sommer etc. Later on the classics came into the focus of my interest: Monk, Coltrane, Mingus, Giuffre & especially Lennie Tristano. I have here to add that in the last ten years I lost all my interest in any kind of jazz music. In my opinion jazz became a performing art and people who sought after new language or forms completely disappeared from the scene. Unfortunately jazz became just another boring musical discipline based on technical skill of player who repeats over and over all the well known clichés.
With improvised music I discovered different tendencies in conceptual art as well. This led me to minimal music experiences which interested me a lot at that time. Non dialectic structure & additive rhythmic principles, improvised patterns, non-European scales attracted me in that music though I never was a minimalist.
Soon after, I discovered the new Polish music which influenced me a lot: before all Witlod Lutoslawski, (later I was lucky enough to be able to attend his classes), then early period of Gorecki (then absolutely unknown), Kazimierz Serocki, Wlodzimierz Kotonski & Zygmunt Krauze etc.
Stockhausen was very important for me (especially his electronic) as well as György Ligeti & György Kurtàg. Domestic influences came mostly from Croatian new music: Josip Slavenski, Milko Kelemen, Dubravko Detoni etc.
And to finish with "serious music" influences I have to mention my affinity to American as well as British experimental composers: Morton Feldman, John Cage, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars, Howard Skempton, AMM etc.
Above all, the Bartok-Stravinsky-Schoebnberg (respectively!) triangle was & still is a quintessence.
Finally some rock influences: The Residents & Captain Beefheart should be mentioned at first place; after these: early Pere Ubu, Art Bears, This Heat, Cassiber; early periods of groups like Art Zoyd, PiL, Velvet Underground, the Kraut rock movement (Faust, Can, and the very early Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream – their experimental, I would say pre sequencer period).
Next to this I listened enormously lot to many different music and became a living encyclopedia as some friends called me often. Here I didn’t mention the names from classical music that I studied (and I’m still studying) carefully but let me mention few names very important to me: Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Mahler, and Mussorgsky. Wagner & Mussorgsky were the real beginning of the new music.
Finally I would like to add that my starting point considering musical genres was similar to my starting point with speaking languages. As I’m coming from the mixed background - Hungarian in Ex Yugoslavia - I became a perfect bilingual person from my very early ages and I can’t really tell you which language I learned before. I acquired both in the same time although these languages differ tremendously (Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian). It was similar with music. I started to learn piano officially - which means at music school - at the age of seven. Soon after my official lessons with my older sister we started to play easy pieces for piano four hands and during these sessions we also tried to play rock music pieces heard on radio. With rock, for a piano player jazz was a next logical step and I absorbed all these music’s from the very beginning of my studies so they all became equally important to me.
How did you meet the RIO/Avant garde world?

For me, back to early eighties in East Europe the idea of the "Rock in Opposition" was the only one who showed a good will to communicate and pay some attention to people who didn’t belong to the huge cultural hegemonies. East European countries - mostly due to the World Music movement and some New Age tendencies (both fake and very superficial phenomena’s) - today are in a kind of fashion, but they were completely neglected back to those times and if it happened that you belonged to them you was sentenced to deep marginality. And finally somebody from London as Chris Cutler had a good will to listen to us, publish us and somehow tried to torn us out from the insignificant position. This was a real gift from heaven and very important to all of us. Not to speak about the healthy idea of braking the barriers between styles and aesthetics and get a rid of “leisure” notion in some serious musical styles in the world of art rock movement.

Do you want to describe your music to our readers?

The most difficult thing – it certainly embraces different territories and melts down one vision, where modernity meets archaic. My music is deeply rooted in the tradition, culture and lifestyle of so called Mittele Europa and I always considered myself as a descendent of that tradition. Austro – Hungarian empire wasn’t only a prison for the nations (as many French and British historians refers) but also a tremendous melting pot of different nations, traditions, cultures, religions. Great philosophers, artist, writers, musicians and scientists came from that background and I think they wouldn’t be possible anywhere else. Well, you compatriot Claudio Magris wrote some great books on that topic.

Classical music and RIO/Avant garde are both a part of your musical activities, how do you reconcile them? Which are the differences and the similes of these two kind of musical languages? Could they enrich each others?

My biggest problem was always that I really liked much different music so I didn’t see the real cause or rational explanation why should we keep them apart from each other. Nowadays this seems quiet normal in some music circles but back to 25 years ago you had to be declared as jazz, rock, blues, punk, reggae, classical or whatever musician. The harshest resistance always came from the classical - both avant-guard or traditional - world. In those circles everything which didn’t came out from the Great Tradition was considered as less important and underrated with great pleasure. This is very true for composers who continue the hardliner avant-guarde musical language established after the WW2 during the summer courses in German town of Darmstadt. In fact all those musicians are the very same descendants of the very same great tradition, for them the real schism never really existed. The so called split with the tradition was founded in the very same tradition just with opposite presage.
Even in the broadest sense the so called avant-guard act of those people was deeply rooted into the Judeo-Christian religious, prophetical tradition although they all rejected any connections with aspects of tradition, especially the religious one. The avant-guard artist took the role of the messiah and tried to save the world out of the sin of tonal music and anything else which doesn’t reached the highest level, imposed by the initialised visionaries. Philosophically based on the foundation of esthetical and social theory by T.W. Adorno (his well known permanent state of negation) the rather simplified mis-en-scene was ready to be employed. Unfortunately many of those rules remained untouched until nowadays in many countries of West Europe. Something very different happened in USA which didn’t have a tradition to relate to, in West European sense that’s the very reason for the appearance of composers as Harry Partch, John Cage, La MonteYoung, Steve Reich and many others unthinkable in West Europe of those times.
In all formations I led, next to classically trained musicians I always added at least one person with non-classical background (jazz or rock). This usually worked great as jazz or rock musicians, with their different feel of timing and agogic solutions somehow watered down the stiffness often present in the world of classical performers. I have to underline here that in the eighties the great part of improvisers in Europe had a keen interest to participate in new music experiments. With the appearance of the neo bop movement most of them turned their back to any kind of experiments and stepped back into neo -swing, bop, cool or whatever spheres. Suddenly I founded out that in the meantime rock musicians became very literate and technically speaking moved much forward. That’s how I decided to melt in some of my classical pieces in the texture of the Science Group. For example pieces as Napoleon, Chimera and Aleph Zero are based on the different parts of my composition for 4 saxophones and piano entitled Wild Motion and Silence composed back in 1989. When I started to work on rearrangements I had few doubts but when I heard the result I started to believe that my serious stuff actually sounds much better in the rock medium. A real Copernican turn for somebody who never played in a rock group (I played a lot of improvised and experimental music but never in a rock band). So the tendency continues - on the next Science Group CD, I reused some classical pieces of mine as well.
Folk music is another very important source in my and many East European composer’s cases. That music is still a living tradition in many places in East Europe. In some isolated parts of Transylvania, some of them hardly touched by any civilised tendencies, you can still find musicians who play exactly the same music which was played hundreds years ago and this has no connection with the nowadays overwhelming world music mish-mash movement. Due to this “time machine effect” like phenomena we still - I don’t know for how long before all that tradition became just a part of Coke culture as well - have an astonishing opportunity to face the extraordinarily rich tradition which always offers a healthy source to build on something fresh. Music and art in East Europe is something embedded deeply in the tradition of many little nations. In the history of West Europe one can clearly point out that in many historical periods art was not much than a noble way of wasting time. Constantly under the danger of Mongolian or later on, Turkish invasions, often faced with the possibility of being annihilated by them, many East European nations considered they culture as an ultimate way of preserving the sign of their existence in this planet. That’s the reasons why one can find such a rich folk music, literate and art tradition there while - with the exception of few orally preserved legends - the folk tradition at West is almost insignificant.

Which musical aim do you want to reach with your compositions?

Definitely not esthetical aims – my approach is purely an anthropological one. For me music is in the first place communication and not information. People usually listen to the music from two points of view: the first and the most spread is looking after entertainment (all the commercial music) and the second is seeking for (new) information (prior to intellectuals and specialists, who judge music from the degree of complexity and development of the information embedded in the piece of music). This is a typical scientific approach which stands directly with the technical achievement of the epoch and searches always after the progress as ultimate aim.
The term of progress is very important in today’s civilisation. However we shouldn’t forget that civilisation stands for our technical standard. You can be much civilised, surrounded with the latest technological achievements but this doesn’t necessarily means that your culture reached high values and vice versa. Many tribes in Africa with rich culture still live on a very basic level of the civilisation. Culture is in a realm of soul and as metaphysical category is not necessarily and always influenced by the technical achievements. There is a revolution and progress in technology but not much in culture. At least I don’t believe much in it as this is a term borrowed from the utilitarian philosophies where everything is aiming to be materialised (and all the roads lead us to profit). Ralph Waldo Emerson in his diary stated that “The history of literature . . . is a sum of very few ideas and of very few original tales, all the rest being variation of these.”
There isn’t much new or completely unheard - wouldn’t be of human origin. The chimera of being progressive or avant-guard or radical is just another sticker in the super market.

By the way, which kind of method do you prefer to use to obtain new solutions in your compositions?

I don’t have any method – I’m a pure intuitive composer. I was always horrified by music which is based on a rigid system or method. Of course I use different compositional techniques, but that’s something different and necessary. It’s a language but not method nor system. And I don’t one to be new – I want to be myself, one drop in the ocean of humanity who tells his personal story about the same humanity. The rest is really unimportant.

A new “The Science Group” is ready to realease, could you tell us something about it?

Many reactions after the release of the first Science Group CD were related to the high complexity of the compositions and the CD was praised for it. Complexity definitely wasn’t the ultimate aim but it was rather the non intentional output of the compositional expression which interests me.
Cathedrals in France were extremely difficult to build with the technology of those times. Still when we look at them our first impression isn’t about the difficulty but harmony. It’s not very difficult to write in a difficult manner but what is really difficult to make complex texture sounding comprehensible and acceptable. This is where the post II.W.W. high culture sucks – the antagonism between thinking (brain) and singing (heart), where - with the pretext of being serious equals with being complex - the brain wins always over the emotions. This is also where popular culture sucks as well – cheap emotions exclude any intellectual reflection and efforts. I always tried to take the best from the both world and in the same time wasn’t much impressed by the fact who was the first. I always thought the first is not necessarily the best. I do prefer the not pioneers with some content to pioneers without any content, full with l’art pour l’art-istic news.
In the same time it’s true that the Science Group aesthetic is also my personal reaction to the painful and omnipresent tendency of simplifying everything to its extent. This trend in the so called modern and democratic systems tends to fulfil only one aim: the easiest way to make profit without paying attention of possibly undesirable side effects. This philosophy impose another one: everything should be offered as trouble-free and possible with the help of just one click on the button of your computer. Everything is pre-selected and after you pushed the right button and you become a great composer, visual artist, writer or what else. Many of today’s art don’t have any cultural nor anthropological but purely technical background. This is the other one and old antagonism between civilisation and culture. For the moment technique is a winner but we see more and more desperate and hopeless faces in the crowded world of technical solitude.

What about the future (new projects, new directions...)?

I just finished my new composition for the guys from the Gidon Kremer’s ensemble gathered around the so called Kremerata Baltica Sextet. At the moment I’m working also on two new pieces for excellent soloists and there are also some mutual plans with the famous Keller Quartett. Next to this I still work on my solo album, which is once again postponed but I think it will be finished next year.

At the moment do you think that is there a musical movement where the RIO/avant-garde/progressive bands could identify themselves, find realities (artists, press, labels, promoters...) with whom stimulate their ideas and improve the diffusion of this musical genre?

I really think the moment is at least hopeless. I was never again commercial music but the dictatorship of the entertainment industry – led by people totally ignorant in music, set up by the worst branch of business man, lawyers and other legally tolerated and elected Mafiosi – really kills any hope for some little place under the big sky. Thanks to their “philosophy” the history is “enriched” by the new phenomena in music (certainly borrowed from the B rated Hollywood movie world) which stands for killing (I do relate here to the rap gang wars). Music was up to date always a language of tolerance and communication but here we are – we added some blood just to make it more understandable. Anyway seventies were something which is unimaginable in the last fifteen years. Here is the fast backward – electronic experimentations, sympho rock, hard rock, psychedelic music, kraut rock, punk and new wave, rock in opposition, jazz rock, a big part of free jazz, minimal music, ecm jazz and who knows what else. This all happened in the period of more or less 10 years. What happened in the 90’s – rap (almost 100 per cent dull) and techno (some interesting things. . .). Today if you aren’t in the main stream you are the worst looser on the world. OK – let’s make a party and celebrate this great moment. . .

Could you tell us your favourites bands between the new musical generations? Do you know some Italian interesting bands?

I used to listen to much kind of music and this place would be short to mention the names of all those composers, styles and genres I did pay attention. The scariest thing is that without any pre-judgement or any pre-programmed manifesto, I just noticed that since few years my need to listening to music was somehow naturally wiped out. I can’t really describe what happened. One of the reasons could be that since I started to write more seriously (I stopped to write on music, that’s the most boring literature especially writings on new music topics) in free time I rather take a book in my hands than put some music in my CD player (and I’m a person who can’t do the both things in the same time).
Still, to name at least one name, I have to say sometimes I use to check out what young musicians are doing. Unfortunately there isn’t much exiting area so if I drop most of the musical trends without any interest for me (rap, world, boring jazz and even worst classical avant guard music) there isn’t much left with the exception of few young people in experimental techno. Well the last interesting thing I heard was Squarepusher with his Go Plastic CD which is really impressive. It isn’t really my cup of tea but I appreciate it.

Do you want to add something?

Well I think I said much more I was supposed…