László Sáry, Composer Who Turned Trains into Music, Dies at 86

László Sáry, the Hungarian composer whose tape works 'Studies for Steam Engines' and 'Locomotive Symphony' turned childhood railway sounds into electroacoustic art, died November 14 at 86. He was a founding member of the Budapest New Music Studio and the inventor of a teaching method now used on three continents.

He was born January 1, 1940, in Győr, Hungary, and grew up in a railway apartment near Pannonhalma, where his father was stationmaster. The trains of his boyhood became, decades later, his raw material. From 1961 to 1966 he studied composition with Endre Szervánszky at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. His brother, József Sári, also became a noted composer.

What did the Budapest New Music Studio achieve?

Sáry's early works followed Béla Bartók before he absorbed the techniques of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1970, at the initiative of Albert Simon, he co-founded the Budapest New Music Studio with Zoltán Jeney, László Vidovszky, Péter Eötvös and Zoltán Kocsis. Between 1972 and 1990 the ensemble premiered more than 600 contemporary works in Hungary and abroad, with Sáry active as both composer and performer, including the collective work 'Pentagram' (1982).

A visit to the Darmstadt Summer Courses (the legendary German new-music forum) in 1972 changed his direction. There he met the American composer Christian Wolff and studied scores by Wolff, John Cage, Earle Brown and Steve Reich. Soon after, in 'Sounds for…,' he abandoned traditional European harmony and structure.

Through the 1970s and 1980s he explored repeating patterns, rotating chords and pitch permutations in works such as:

• 'A Continuity of Rotative Chords'
• 'Fives Repeated,' built from 120 permutations of five pitches
• 'Ludus Cromaticus'

Then came the trains. Turning to electronics and musique concrète (music made from recorded real-world sounds), he paid tribute to the steam engines of his childhood with 'Studies for Steam Engines' in 1996, which won third prize at the International Rostrum of Electroacoustic Music in Vienna, and 'Locomotive Symphony' in 1997.

What survives beyond the concert hall?

Plenty. His catalogue includes orchestral and stage works — 'Canzone solenne,' 'Musica per 24 archi e 24 fiati,' 'Concerto Classico,' 'Hyperion's Song of Destiny,' the opera 'Adorjánok és Jenők,' the oratorio drama 'Theomachia,' the chamber opera 'Ének a kőszívű királyról' and the 'Finnugor oratórium,' which won the Artisjus Award for Classical Composition of the Year in 2016.

From the mid-1970s he developed Creative Music Practice, a system of exercises in improvisation, concentration and ensemble listening that became known worldwide as the Sáry Method. He published it as a book in 1999 and taught it at Budapest's University of Theatre and Film Arts and in teacher workshops in Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Belgium and Estonia. From 1994 he joined Yehudi Menuhin's MUSE program, bringing music to children from disadvantaged communities.

He also wrote for theatre and film. He became musical director of Budapest's József Katona Theatre in 1990 and spent three months in Tokyo in 1996 on a Japan Foundation fellowship studying traditional Japanese theatre, dance and music. His film scores earned the Best Music award at the Kecskemét Animation Film Festival in 2002. His honours ran from the Kassák Award and the Ferenc Erkel Prize to the Bartók–Pásztory Award, membership in the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts, and the titles of Merited Artist and Excellent Artist of Hungary.

A stationmaster's son who spent his career finding music in unlikely places, Sáry leaves an instrument that outlasts any single score: every student who learns to truly listen through the Sáry Method keeps his journey, and his trains, running.