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1.
Prologue 00:27
2.
3.
Enkidu 04:44
4.
Shamhat 04:13
5.
6.
Humbaba 03:48
7.
Isthar 04:47
8.
The Bull 01:45
9.
10.
Umnapistim 05:35
11.
12.

about

Gilgamesh is the second joint music project of Éva Polgár and Sándor Vály. The music, based on the 5,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, is pervaded by extreme expressiveness and melancholic minimalism simultaneously. On the borderline of different time dimensions, the work presents an insoluble tension between realization, death, and eternity. Polgár and Vály continue the musical dialogue already featured on their first album, the Mondrian Variations. That is, the acoustic and electronic dialogue of piano, percussion instruments, and samplers.



Preface

The Epic of Gilgamesh is “the Bible of the creative man,” encompassing all human feelings, ideas, anguish, and pleasure that we experience every day in the beauty of life and in the fear of death. We are roamers on Earth as much as Gilgamesh was.

The Bible has many interpretations - a collective anthology of humanity. We can recognize our own selves at the various stages of our lives in its tales. The Bible also provides answers to crises of human existence. So too may be considered The Epic of Gilgamesh. Parts of The Old Testament reflect the heroic stories of this Mesopotamian epic. Noah resembles Umnapistim. Furthermore, Jacob with his high intelligence and Esau with his incomparable physical strength recall Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

The CD was born of the initiative of Rainer J. Hanshe, the director of Contra Mundum Press in New York City. Éva Polgár and I based our collaborative work on and closely followed the structure of Stuart Kendall’s English translation of Gilgamesh published by Contra Mundum Press.

I knew the epic for a long time. The magnificent emotional work fascinated me when I first read it. I recognized my life situations many times in the ones explored in the most ancient epic of the world, in the book of creation, realization, knowledge of love, friendship, and death. Thus, when Rainer J. Hanshe suggested his idea of a composition on the epic, I knew immediately that I would
be interested. I needed nothing else than to unfold my emotional and intellectual storms of the past decades, and to give notes, rhythm, and melody to them.

Éva and I have been working together for years, and Gilgamesh is our third common musical project. Our compositional method for this material differs from the ones we applied in our earlier projects. Our previous works reflected the connection between visual arts and music. In Bruegel Variations (2009) and Mondrian Variations (2012) we proceeded from the visual composition to the
music score. In this project, literature becomes music.

Like our previous projects, our approach to our most recent work has multiple layers. Éva is a pianist and I am a visual artist. I proceed from a painting toward music, while Éva does the opposite, moving from music toward a painting. In addition, our female/male binary is also of great significance in our collaborations. This musical adventure provided the opportunity for the detached natures of which Adam Kandmon philosophizes to reunify for a moment and to represent male and
female in harmony yet again. The idea of polar opposites served us well in the composition process, since highly powerful counterparts - Shamhat and Enkidu or Isthar and Gilgamesh - face each other in The Epic of Gilgamesh. Every piece on the CD contains the two extremes where the female quality answers the male, one builds upon the other, or they complete each other.

When I create art inspired by the works of others, I respond to the underlying principles that structure their pieces and decide for myself what I hold to be true. Views, opinions of authors come across to me that I don’t necessarily share. Take Mondrian Variations for instance: in spite of admiring Mondrian’s output, I disagree with the painter’s ideology regarding art.

This is the case with Kendal’s English translation of Gilgamesh. He leaves out the last tablet, no.12, which is an essential part of the epic in order to better understand the work as a whole. Many scholars do not consider the last tablet as belonging strictly to The Epic of Gilgamesh. Instead, they treat the last chapter as an appendix attached to the book later in history. Despite the last chapter not
being directly related to the plot, in terms of its purpose and ideology, the tablet is a fundamental element of the epic.

Although subtle, we inserted the twelfth part in our music. The message of tablet no.12 is as follows: only those perish after death who were dead even in life – resonating with Dante in the Divina Commedia. Those who were not brave in life are sent to the first layer of inferno. Awareness of death is paralyzing. On the other hand, those who deal with death have to dare to face it down.

Thus, the twelfth tablet encapsulates the main idea of Gilgamesh: besides offering fame and immortality, bravery shapes the hero’s fate. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the representation of the human’s heroic fight, desire for eternity, and mortal fear. Simultaneously, it is the release of mortal fear. This is the message of the final tablet.

This motive was especially meaningful to me, since this opened the solution for the musical material that concludes with the piece “Back in the City.” Somewhat distorted, somewhat shaking, with anxiety in his heart, nonetheless, the man starts walking the path that was assigned to him, starts to seize his opportunities, and grows wings.

Gilgamesh is the counterpart of Umnapistim. The immortal does not create, he has no reason to do so. Only the mortal creates, and the awareness of mortality is the mindset that created culture. Building this culture can happen only by gaining bravery and facing death. As alluded to earlier, this is one of the reasons I call The Epic of Gilgamesh the Bible of the creating man.

One more observation. According to my knowledge, two translations exist in which Shamhat, Isthar’s priestess is introduced as “saint maiden” instead of prostitute. This concept was another important influence in composing the music.

To me, The Epic of Gilgamesh is among those rare works where the stage of awareness pends between two alternatives. Gilgamesh’s awareness of death is dramatic, since it rose from his friend’s death. On the other hand, Enkidu’s awareness relates to love. Shamhat helped Enkidu to become conscious about his own soul. Thus, civilization, human consciousness came to realization through the exploration of sexuality.

For this reason, I find difficult to accept the ubiquitous tendency to attach something plebeian to moments of exceptional awakenings. Enkidu is portrayed to be the victim of female sexual seduction degrading his experience to the low level of an ordinary sexual act. (This reading is reminiscent of the unfortunate image of women in Christian mythology.) Enkidu is not a victim of seduction! He is a mystic traveler stepping from one dimension of time to another, where the beasts
who lived in brotherhood with Enkidu cannot follow him anymore: with the help of Shamhat, Enkidu arrives from ancient barbarity to the civilized world. The hero steps into the second stage of being. Naturally, this reality can be as dramatic as the other. When we gain something we lose something.

In our music we discover the different dimensions as well. The crossing dimensions of time, the presentation of layers of existence. This may be a key to the relation of the first and second part of the CD that covers distance and dimension between times and entities, and finally reaches the stage, where we, the creators of this music are situated. In 2013. This was our only possible path, since we did not strive to illustrate the epic. Instead, we aimed to deliver it through our own voice. Thus, we started our musical journey of Gilgamesh here, in this time and space.

credits

released April 9, 2020

Composed By Sándor Vály and Éva Polgár

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Sandor Valy Finland

Sándor Vály (1968) is an audiovisual artist born in Hungary and currently living in Finland and Italy. Vály’s art is characterised by conceptual and philosophical dimension, which he uses to operate in the field of contemporary art. His work ranges from music to cinema, performance art and literature. Vály creates holistic works of art that form extensive entities ... more

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