Attila Bozay

Attila Bozay (Balatonfűzfő, 11 August 1939 – Budapest, 14 September 1999) was a Hungarian composer whose output spans much of the second half of the twentieth century in Hungary, from dodecaphony to a more classical style in his final years. His career is worth attention because it illustrates how a musician trained in his country's serial tradition gradually widened his resources towards controlled chance and free expression.

He studied at the Békéstárhos Conservatory and graduated from the Liszt Academy in Budapest in 1962, where he was a pupil of Farkas. The following year he taught harmony at the Szeged conservatory and, between 1963 and 1966, worked in the music department of Hungarian Radio. A UNESCO scholarship took him to Paris for six months in 1967, and on his return he devoted himself entirely to composition. His international profile arrived that same year, when his String Quartet No. 1 was performed at the International Rostrum of Composers and at the ISCM Festival. From 1979 he taught orchestration and composition at the Liszt Academy and, between 1990 and 1993, he directed the Hungarian state concert agency. He received the Erkel Prize in 1968 and 1979, the Bartók-Pásztory Prize in 1988 and the Kossuth Prize in 1990.

Until 1967 his music was based on twelve-note technique, with an emphasis on melodic writing. The Paris stay led him to a less rigorous serial practice and to an interest in sound clusters and timbre. In the 1970s he combined very dense construction with aleatoric techniques, as seen in the series Improvisations (1972–1978). His works for cimbalom and recorder, instruments he himself performed at international festivals, are particularly clear examples of this trait. The opera Csongor és Tünde (1979–1984) marks a decisive turn in his career, and in it he introduced a system of 10+2 sounds that he continued to use afterwards. In his later sonatas he returned to traditional forms, and in the orchestral works of the late 1980s and early 1990s a classicism that had already appeared in the opera predominates. His vocal music of this period, by contrast, retains a freely expressive character.

His legacy centres on a broad catalogue encompassing opera, orchestra, chamber music and song, and his works were published mainly by Editio Musica. Among his last compositions is the opera Az öt utolsó szín (1998–1999), premiered in the year of his death, although no details are available about its subsequent reception.