The Eighth Tribe, 1978 (5. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1978-08-01 / 8. szám

August, 1978

THE EIGHTH TRIBE

Page 7

Géza Szabó and The Bellflower Symphony Orchestra. An Electrical Engineer and Conductor confession about his . . .

TWO LIVES, A WORLD APART

The story started in 1925 when I was bom. My father was a lawyer, my mother a teacher. The life in Hungary was peaceful just as everywhere else in the world. People were going after their everyday duties: jobs, worries and pleasures. I don’t remember clearly, what I did in the first five years of my life. I assume I was just like any other kid. One thing I remember sharply. My grandmother, who was a concert pianist in her early life, started me on the piano. At first the keys were immensely big for me, hard to push and completely mysterious, complicated and illogical. Short time past, when the pieces started falling in place. After couple years I felt home on the keyboard and started boggleing up sonatas, works of Bach, Clementi, Corelli, Mozart, Shubert etc., etc. It was an experience and fun, so overwhelming, that this became the goal of my future.

A decade past, I graduated from High School, my family urged me to choose a profession for my future. They did not very well believe in anybody’s future as a musician. So I enrolled in the Technical University of Budapest. I did rather well and after a two years intermission on account of the war, I received my masters in electrical engineering. The year was 1950. My first love of music took over my life and I started the six most beautiful years of my life. To complete facts, I never stopped studying music during my high school and university years. I had parallel classes, technical and music during those years. So in 1950 I had a degree in engineering as well as in music, specialty in piano, string bass, french horn and percussion. This unusual combination of instruments were necessary to enroll in conducting classes at the Academy of Music. The freedom fight of Hungary in 1956 ended those glorious six years for me. Like so many thousands, I had to escape to the west to avoid a sure death.

The next two years were very strange for me. I had to face a new world in Western Germany. The customs, the language was strange, the people were strangers, hut one thing was exactly the same, the music. After two years of struggle my family and I arrived in the United States of America.

Here I was, 35 years of age, with my wife and a small son in the middle of a world, which was so far in every respect from the way of life, I was used to, that it could have been as well the moon itself. To continue music for me was hopeless. The only thing

in peoples minds was to make a buck, go to trips on weekends and go to the ballgame. This was very depressing first to me. The ballgame I was not familiar with, the dollars were very hard to come by, and a new language I had to learn. On top of everything, I could not even use my engineering skills, as I learned them on account of the inch system versus my old metric ways.

The good old technical education of mine however paid off, in three years I was at a modest level of technical skill the American way. I earned my living. More and more I started to become an American. I started liking baseball, football — I missed soccer very much though — liked to take trips with my car, and made friends.

Only one matter bothered me very much. There was no music around for all practical purposes. This time I was already established as an engineer, and mastered the english language rather well. We also became U.S. citizens. The whole world was right with us. Except the music was missing. In 1968 the urge was so painful, that I had to do something about it. I decided to form an orchestra. In January the work begun and in June I presented my first concert with the Bellflower Symphony Orchestra. To be exact, at the first three concerts we called ourselves the Mid Cities Orchestra. The City started helping and later adopting us at the end of the year.

From this time my life was different. Every spare moment was used to improve, expand the operation of my orchestra. We presented a concert in every 6 or 7 weeks. The best musicians started coming to me, the quality of the concert was getting better and better. I started to pick music, which was a little bit over the capability of my group. This was a threefold experiment. First my group gave concerts much more frequently than other community orchestras;