Action Painting with Music by Frank Zappa

Bartók Konzi – New Music is running for its eleventh year at the Bartók Conservatory, the training school of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music. As an extracurricular element, the programme aims to broaden the musical horizons of student musicians and prepare them to interpret contemporary music. The organisers are keen to involve as many students as possible in the various events, which will then be presented in a spring project day. The young musicians spend months preparing for these events, which are usually loosely based around a theme.

Experimental art and Frank Zappa's work from the 1960s onwards can be linked in many ways. The revival of this way of thinking results in an extremely valuable pedagogical programme, which is an important meeting with the aspirations of contemporary art education. This joint performance by the jazz department of the Bartók Conservatory and students from the School of Fine Arts is a very exciting undertaking. The visual art techniques combined with 30 minutes of semi-composed, semi-improvisational music create a collaborative creative process in which the final form of the musical work and the two paintings that accompany it are born from the power of mutual inspiration. During the months of preparation, sketches are used to outline the details of the concept. At the same time, an important element is the constant search for new paths and the freedom of a shared creative space, which keeps the power of motivation alive throughout the process. In the end, the performance ready score will contain both traditional notation, textual instructions and a jointly developed system of markings.