Artist database

4 March 1943 Szolnok - 28 October 2019 Budapest

Composer, head of department and professor at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy, a significant figure of the Hungarian contemporary music.

He started his composing studies with Zoltán Pongrácz in the Zoltán Kodály Secondary School for Music (Debrecen, 1957-1961). Later on, he studied at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy (Budapest, 1961-1966) as pupil of Ferenc Farkas, and at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome, 1967-1968) as pupil of Goffredo Petrassi.

Returning from Rome and encouraged by Albert Simon, Jeney founded the New Music Studio with Péter Eötvös, Zoltán Kocsis, László Sáry and László Vidovszky in 1970. The studio soon became an internationally renowned workshop for composers and performers, and introduced more than 600 contemporary music works between 1972 and 1990. In 1972, Zoltán Jeney visited the lectures of György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christian Wolff and Iannis Xenakis on the composing courses of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. Especially the personality and music of Christian Wolff made deep impact on him.

In order to research unknown connections of soundings, from 1973 he's started to get involved in diverse non-music materials (texts, chess games, meteorological data, telexes and from 1979 even fractal lines) to rewrite them into music processes. Between 1975 and 1984 he sang in the choir of Schola Hungarica, conducted by László Dobszay and Janka Szendrei. Being acquainted with the Gregorian music praxis significantly influenced his thinking about music and composing. Based on two, each other completing antique Greek tones, he developed a so-called pseudo modal scale system (Delphi, 1978) that was first used in his composition To Apollo. In 1982 he studied computer music at the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris.

In 1985 he was research professor for four months at the Columbia University, New York. From June 1988 he was scholarship holder of DAAD in West Berlin for a year. From 1986 he’s been teaching at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy. First he taught practical skills of composing, and then in 1995 he became head of the composing and conductor-training department. Since 2002 he’s been head of the doctoral school as well. In 1999 he taught as guest professor at music department of the Northwestern University, Chicago (School of Music). In 1993 he was elected to member of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Art – his inaugural concert was in October, 1996. He was chairman of the Association of Hungarian Composers (1993-1996), board member of the ISCM, International Society of Contemporary Music (1993-1999), and in frames of the latter organization he was also vice president between 1996 and 1999.

Among his works we can find orchestral compositions, chamber works, songs, choir works, electronic and computer music works, co-operations with other composers and incidental music (theater, movie). He permanently worked with Gábor Zsámbéki and Zoltán Huszárik (Jeney composed the soundtrack of Huszárik’s movie, Sindbad). With László Vidovszky he composed music for the Hungarian pavilion of the Sevilla World Expo in 1992. In 2005 he finished his monumental oratorio, Funeral ceremony, which he had permanently worked on since 1987. The premiere of the six-piece work was held 22 October, 2005, in the Palace of Arts with the National Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, conducted by Zoltán Kocsis.

Many of his works premiered abroad as well. He's been regularly invited to Ny Musik of Boras. In frames of a ten-concert series, the orchestra introduced more than thirty works by him in Sweden, 1984. A number of his CDs were published by Hungarian and foreign record companies. In 1979 he received the Kassák Prize from the literary periodical Magyar Műhely that was published in Paris.

He was honored with the Ferenc Erkel Prize (1982), the title Merited Artist (1990), the Kossuth Prize (2001), the Artisjus Music Prize (2001) and the Aegon Art Co-Award (2006). He also received the Bartók-Pásztory Award two times (1988 and 2006).