condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Insert included.

By the late 1980s, the generational story of Hungarian new music had acquired a distinct shape. The New Music Studio founders - Zoltán Jeney, László Sáry, László Vidovszky, Péter Eötvös - had established their positions within the international avant-garde. Group 180 had documented the process music reception. The question now was what came after, and who was doing it.

The Young Composers Group (YCG) formed around composers born roughly in the 1950s - graduates of the Liszt Academy working in the decade after the New Music Studio generation had defined the scene. Máté Hollós (b. 1954), who would later serve as president of the Hungarian Composers' Union and eventually as CEO of Hungaroton itself, is the figure associated most closely with the group's institutional history; but the music on this LP represents a collective effort to define what it meant to write contemporary Hungarian music at a moment when the precedents were both rich and slightly oppressive. The language is varied: some of the pieces engage with the serial and post-serial methods of the preceding generation, others reach toward a more lyrical or folk-inflected voice, all of them share the quality of being made by composers who had absorbed the previous thirty years of Hungarian new music and were trying to find their own relationship to it.

A document of a transitional moment - the Hungaroton series doing what it did best, providing a continuous record of where Hungarian composition was at any given decade. Original 1988 pressing.