Iris Szeghy

Iris Szeghy, a Slovak composer of Hungarian origin, entered the music scene in the 1980s as the first female composer. Her work has received several awards, and she has been granted various scholarships and participated in numerous composition courses. Her music appears more frequently abroad than in Slovakia, and she currently lives and works outside her home country. Her compositional output includes orchestral and choral works, as well as pieces for chamber ensembles—both instrumental and vocal. Her music has been performed at various festivals across Europe, America, and Asia by renowned interpreters, including at portrait concerts in Bremen, Hamburg, Stuttgart, San Diego, and Dublin. She has received commissions from the Bratislava Music Festival, the Hilliard Ensemble, the Pro Helvetia cultural foundation, the Boswiler Sommer Festival, and many chamber ensembles and performers.

She studied composition and piano at the Conservatory in Košice and at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava (composition with Andrej Očenáš, followed by postgraduate studies in composition with Ivan Hrušovský). Since 1990, she has worked as an independent composer.

"Szeghy’s work hitherto as a whole is remarkable for the quantity of compositional techniques assimilated. Two principal motifs are represented there: the tradition of European music of the last three centuries, and the avantgarde tendencies of the last fifty years, directed against that tradition. Inevitably, tension arises between these interests when they meet. Szeghy, however, does not elevate this inner conflict to the status of a central style-forming element. Her treatment of divergent material does not lead the listener to an awareness of 'shocking' contradictions; rather, her entire work is subordinated to a basic procedure: the 'new' is integrated into the 'old', and vice versa. In this synthetic process she places a distinct emphasis on defamiliarisation of the musical statement. She strives for this on the one hand by direct confrontation of the established 'traditional' texture with the ephemeral sonorousness of contemporary techniques of note-forming (including electro-acoustic music), while at other times she chooses immersion in a pre-selected form (e.g. ciaccona), seeking an interpenetration of objective and subjective elements in the space demarcated by this form. Other important motivating sources for Szeghy are the values coming from visual art (Hommage à Rodin), literature (Afforismi), and archaic folklore (Midsummer Night’s Mystery)."

(ZAGAR, Peter: Iris Szeghy. In: A Hundred Slovak Composers. Eds. Marián Jurík, Peter Zagar. Bratislava : National Music Centre Slovakia, 1998, p. 274.)