Metamorphose und Eruption

"The sounds become nature through the composition—similar to the process of a painter who can create an entire world in his painting." When Adriana Hölszky wants to explain her working method, she thinks of processes that transform her musical material. The composer finds her inspiration in nature as a mystery and a challenge. It determines and permeates her works, giving rise to a highly original expressiveness of sound characterized by breaks and proliferations, by the appearance and disappearance of musical material, by the charging and discharging of states of tension. Hölszky's music can propagate dynamically, but it can also remain static, with sudden eruptions signaling change. This rearranges the elements and sets metamorphoses in motion: a biological system, a pulsating fabric in which everything can become sound, like lava flowing in time with the music.

Musicologist Dr. Maria Kostakeva has made the first attempt to comprehensively capture what distinguishes Adriana Hölszky's highly complex music. Her book "Metamorphosis and Eruption – Approaches to the Sound Worlds of Adriana Hölszky" is a comprehensive phenomenological study of this composer. It was written in close collaboration with Hölszky herself. This is particularly evident in the five conversations published here for the first time, in which the composer talks at length about her life and her art. In "Metamorphosis and Eruption," Maria Kostakeva touches on essential features of Adriana Hölszky's musical style. In addition to the composer's roots in nature, the author notes an "inner theatricality" in the works, which has its origin in gesture. In Adriana Hölszky's work, the human body becomes a total, sound-producing instrument in which the visual and the acoustic are inseparably linked. At the same time, the sound space of the works changes. Labyrinthine perspectives open up: a cabinet of correspondences and reflections emerges, which is in a state of constant transformation. The idea of what music theater can be expands in Hölszky's work in an unprecedented way: her stage works lead into the realms of dreams, the surreal, and the unconscious. Maria Kostakeva sheds light on her cultural, intellectual, and literary background. In doing so, she outlines the highly original work of a composer who is one of the most innovative and creative minds of our time.

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