Máté Bella

Sounds of Generation Y, Part II

Máté Bella: Sounds of Generation Y, Part II
Sounds of Generation Y Part II was commissioned by Theater Altenburg-Gera in 2018. Stylistically the piece is a sequel to a previous orchestral work of mine which I had been asked to compose by the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2015. This was Sounds of Generation Y, a work that I wrote seeking to explore the possibility of incorporating popular music into classical music, just as Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály did with folk music.
The motivation behind this effort was witnessing the audience for classical music dwindle, and I was seeing every day how challenging it is to address and engage young people, who will be the listeners filling concert halls in the future. Literature refers to the population born between 1980 and 1995 as Generation Y, and the population born beetween 1995 and 2010 as Generation Z. I belong to Generation Y, a generation that was born into digital culture. We were the first generation to grow up with the internet as its primary venue for accessing information, the platform where we perform our everyday errands and where we communicate with our friends. Digital culture is the watershed between Generation Y and previous generations, and it is central to the youth of today. My goal is to discover how to address today’s youth with classical music and awaken their interest for this genre.
In Sounds of Generations Y, Part II, I divided the orchestra into two smaller ones – consisting of almost the same instruments – that work as two loudspeakers. Sometimes the sound material comes from the right, sometimes from the left, complementing each other and helping the listener navigate the landscape of the piece. These stereo-like ideas create the strand of the orchestral material in my piece, led by the solo music materials. The cimbalom plays mechanical arpeggio of the chords throughout the whole piece, the chords appear in the orchestra material as well, sometimes in the form of soft horizontal sound blocks and at times as vertically fragmented rhythms. I saw the solo instrument as a digital keyboard that controls the whole orchestra, neglecting its folksy character.
The musical structures used in the composition are characteristic of American minimalism in many of their aspects, making the piece more comprehensible even for an audience less familiar with contemporary classical music. Swedish pop music had a strong influence on the direction of the chord sequences and the rhythmic ideas of my composition. However, it is important to note that my main purpose was not to make the orchestra play popular or dance music, but to explore how the musical elements found in popular music can be integrated into a symphonic environment..
Máté Bella, Budapest, 2020