László Sáry

László Sáry was born in Győr, Hungary, on 1 January 1940. He grew up in a railway service flat in a small village near Pannonhalma, where his father was the stationmaster. The sound of passing locomotives was a constant presence, and Sáry said his love of rhythm and noise, and later pieces such as Studies for Steam Engines and the Locomotive Symphony, came from those years. His older brother József Sári, who became a Kossuth Prize winning composer, encountered music first, at the Benedictine grammar school in Pannonhalma, and the pieces he brought home to practise made a strong impression on his younger brother.

Sáry studied composition at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest as a pupil of Endre Szervánszky, graduating in 1966. His year group included the composers Zoltán Jeney and László Vidovszky. From 1966 to 1974 he held a scholarship from the Hungarian Music Fund (Zenei Alap). His brother József had also studied with Szervánszky.

In 1970, at the initiative of Albert Simon, Sáry co-founded the Budapest New Music Studio with Zoltán Jeney, László Vidovszky, Péter Eötvös, Zoltán Kocsis and György Kurtág. Based in Rottenbiller Street for twenty years, it presented more than 600 contemporary works between 1972 and 1990, with Sáry performing as well as composing.

His 1972 visit to Darmstadt, where he met Christian Wolff, turned him away from Bartók inspired and serial styles towards experimental, open forms. Sounds for... (1972) was the first fruit of that shift, followed by works built on repetition, rotating chords and permutations, such as A Continuity of Rotative Chords (1982), Fives Repeated (1985) and Ludus Cromaticus (1987), and the collective improvisation Pentagram (1982). His tape piece Studies for Steam Engines (1996) took third prize at the 7th International Rostrum of Electroacoustic Music in Vienna in 1998, and the Locomotive Symphony (1997) was released by BMC Records.

From the early 1980s he wrote incidental music for theatre and film, and from 1990 he was music director of the Katona József Theatre in Budapest. He spent three months in Tokyo in 1996 on a Japan Foundation fellowship. His stage works include the mystery play In Sol (1991), the chamber operas Élőképek (1993) and Adorjánok és Jenők (1994), and Remek hang a futkosásban (2004), a half serious opera on a poem by Sándor Weöres. According to the Budapest Music Center he composed more than eighty works, from chamber music to orchestral pieces.

Sáry began developing Creative Music Activities (Kreatív zenei gyakorlatok) in the mid 1970s, first as exercises to help Hungarian musicians play the experimental Western scores the New Music Studio had brought back from Darmstadt. The method uses text scores, games, body sounds and found materials to build improvisation, concentration and listening, and asks both teacher and player to interpret each exercise freely. Pieces such as Pebble Playing in a Pot and Canon to the Rising Sun became widely known through it. The book was published by Jelenkor in Pécs in 1999, with English (2000/2001) and German (2006) editions. He taught it at music schools and at the University of Theatre and Film Arts, gave courses for teachers in Japan, England, France, Italy, Belgium and Estonia, and from 1994 used it in Yehudi Menuhin's MUSE project for disadvantaged children.

Sáry came from a musical family. His older brother was the composer József Sári, and his son Bánk Sáry is also a composer who has collaborated with him (including on the Finno-Ugric Oratorio of 2016 and Kassák and MADI) and looks after his father's work. Details of his marriage have not been made public in the sources consulted.

Sáry deliberately avoided closed forms and fixed schemes, favouring variety and the training of creative imagination. In his exercises dissonance, noise, body sounds and chance were accepted as part of the music, reflecting a belief that a problem can have many solutions, in music and in life. He summed up his approach in one line: "Music is joy, which fills player and listener alike with cheerfulness and good humour."

As a founder of the New Music Studio, Sáry helped bring experimental and minimalist music into Hungarian concert life and, eventually, into the musical canon. His Creative Music Activities remain in use by music teachers, music therapists and drama educators in Hungary and abroad, and ensembles such as Amadinda and the Metrum Ensemble have recorded or built programmes around his music and games.

Kassák Prize (1979). Erkel Ferenc Prize (1986). Bartók - Pásztory Award (1993). Third prize, 7th International Rostrum of Electroacoustic Music, Vienna (1998), for Studies for Steam Engines. Member of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts (1999). Merited Artist of Hungary (2000). Best Music award, Kecskemét Animation Film Festival (2002). Excellent Artist of Hungary (2008). Artisjus Prize, classical work of the year (2016), for Remek hang a futkosásban. Hungarian Theatre Critics' Award for his work at the Katona József Theatre.

Selected recordings: Snail Play (Hungaroton, 1979); Amadinda (Hungaroton, 1987); The Voice of Time, Fives Repeated and other works (Hungaroton, 1996); Locomotive Symphony (BMC Records, 1998); Dance Music (BMC Records, 2003); Kassák and MADI with Bánk Sáry (2005). Book: Kreatív zenei gyakorlatok (Creative Music Activities), Jelenkor, Pécs, 1999, with English and German editions.

The death of László Sáry, in his 87th year, was announced by the Hungarian classical music site Papageno on 14 November 2026. He was 86. The exact date, place and cause of death have not been made public in the reports available so far.