Bence Hartl
*17 August 1987
Works by Bence Hartl
Biography
Bence Hartl was born in Budapest. At the age of seven he started to learn violin and as a teenager he turned to the classical guitar. After high school he studied philosophy and aesthetics at Eötvös Loránd University - Faculty of Humanities. He wrote his Bachelor-degree thesis about Bertrand Russell's denotation-theory. He studied as a guitarist at Szeged University and later at Vienna Konservatorium. He got degrees as philologist, guitarist, teacher and conductor. Over the years his most important teachers were: Gábor Brezovcsik (guitar), Andrea Bozóki (guitar), Ede Roth (guitar) and Iván Madarász (music theory and composition).
He was a guitarist in several chamber music formations. As a founder and leader of S.W.A.T. Guitar Ensemble (HU) he staged contemporary and rare guitar quartets and played many concerts with his team at renowned concert locations. He played together with other instrumentalists as well and took part in contemporary and mixed media performances. Currently he plays in the Clarinet-Guitar Project, in the Cluster Project and occasionally with other formations.
Bence Hartl took part in several mixed media projects as a composer, guitarist or performing artist. He composed music for theater and theatrical performance, creates regurally paraphrases of classical pieces, composes and plays music for videoinstallations. His long-time collaborator in this area is Jenő Lévay acclaimed visual artist, but he worked together with others as well, such as modern dancer and experimental artist Tomaas Yilssom, director of film and theater Arpad Sopsits and others.
His pieces were performed in the USA, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Greece, Ukraine and Russia by such performers as the soloist of New Music Studio Moscow, virtuoso violinists (Édua Zádory, Gabriella Márffy, Epameinondas Tzivenis) and guitarist (Dora Cserenyec, Marcell Nickmann, Fabio Adour), Tamas Palfalvi (trumpet), the Somogyi String Quartet, Rupert Bergmann (baritone) and others. In 2019 he got the 2nd Prize at the Fifth Edison Denisov Young Composer’s International Competiton, in 2020 he was a finalist at the 1st Chalki International Composition Competition and in 2021 he won the 1st prize at the International Composition Competition of the Miami GuitART Festival.
Alongside his activities he teaches classical guitar, chamber music and music theory. Since 2018 he lives, works and creates in Germany.
About the music
After years of studying philosophy, one can come to the conclusion, that the things really worth dealing with in life are only music and maybe abstract visual art. The premises leading to this conclusion are countless. If you close read the great works of empiricism, logic, analytic philosophy and - of course - scepticism, you might find that there are a lot of groundbreaking problems concerning, well, about everything and most of time, we cannot even properly discuss these problems. The famous last sentence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus summarises it elegantly: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Music is however a rather closed system with its immanent rules and consequences and it has not much to do with the rest of the so-called world. Each piece is a world of its own, a playground for the composer and for the performer and an unrepeatable exploration for the listener. The system can be old - tonality, atonality, serialism etc. - or new: a unique compositional technique created specifically for the given piece. Both ways can be fun and also struggling for all three members of this triangle, but since there is no other choice but doing it, we just try to do it the best way we can.