Or: Preaching to the unconverted. 

I think the first thing to say about Kurtág is that he is, by the standards of many favourites of these boards, quite a conventional composer. By which I mean that he's not trying to rewrite the rulebook on anything: he sits quite comfortably within a compositional tradition (something like Beethoven-Schumann-Bartók), rather than attempting to be avant garde.

But it's what he does with that tradition that is where it gets interesting. He's very much a pitch-based composer, and his contrapuntal and harmonic senses are very finely tuned. He has a knack for putting notes together, horizontally and vertically, whereby they can suggest much more than they say. Even if his materials are very often borrowed - from himself, from other composers, or 'objets trouvés' that are so banal as to belong to no one - he tweaks them just enough to retain their identity and make them his own. So there's the constant presence of musical history - often really big, canonical music history - throughout his music, alongside a laying-out of the barest fundamentals of music (see the C major scales of ...quasi una fantasia..., eg), such that you start to lose sight of which is which, and which is him.

The connections aren't just in the music, of course, but very often laid over the top too, in titles, subtitles and dedications, all of which are rarely innocent of any association you can pin to them.

And then there are the performance requirements: a lot of compositional effort is channeled towards making the performances just slightly awkward (hands unnecessarily crossing at the keyboard, wide vocal melismas suddenly exposed), forcing the performer's self-awareness. As the listener needs to do too, the performer also has to bring to the music a broad knowledge of performance practice (the marcato a la Kocsis direction), and the ability to play something with the feeling of one thing, even if it's written as something else ('waltzes' that are written two-to-a-bar). And don't forget Kurtág's notoriously demanding reputation as an instrumental teacher

This all piles up, pushing the music towards an unattainable ideal, in which 500 years-worth of music history has to be forced through a single note, the single action of a performer - and heard as such. It's knife-edge stuff, and leads to a red raw intimacy in the music. It feels confessional, almost to the point of embarrassing; I find it extremely highly charged, even erotic at times. It's not always comfortable - Samuel Beckett: What is the Word, for example, is a very troubling piece - but it is always very powerful. That said, it's not something I can deal with in large doses - Kafka-Fragmente is just too much for me, it's unrelenting.

That was a bit of a gush, sorry - any one else got any thoughts 

That's interesting - I think that way about several other composers, but K's not one of them. Even if there is a vaguely similar underlying ethos to the different pieces, they're all quite distinct to me. (And sonically they cover a pretty wide range too.)


Well, there's obvious one: Hommage a R. Sch, op.15d, but I expect you know that! (There's also a Hommage a Schumann in the Kafka Fragments, and I expect buried in Játékok somewhere, although I'd have to check.)

< browses bibliography >

I've not read it, but you might want to check out K. Schweizer, 1998: 'Kurtág und Schumann: Traum und Konstruktion', Musik und Asthetik, vii, pp.106-109

Seems to be the only article so far to really look at the link.

That's a very helpful introducton, Tim, which from my limited experience of Kurtag's music falls recognisably into place even though I could never have expressed it  -  particularly the point about how the notes manage to imply (goodness knows how) far more than they say themselves. 

I find that he is a composer whose work has a much greater impact in live performance than in recordings (I mean in addition to the usual reasons). It hadn't occurred to me before but maybe this has something to do with what you describe about the performance requirements he builds in, and actually being able to observe (if pretty subliminally in my case  ) the effect of the dialogue he is having as a composer with the performers is a necessary part of the full Kurtag experience?

I haven't, as yet, been able to work my way into the two (?) big orchestral works but that is undoubtedly me rather than him.

[Later. The two big orchestral works I was thinking of were Grabstein fur Stephen and Stele but I have now got confused about the former. My memory of it (from a 1999 VPO/Rattle Prom) was, I could have sworn, for a fairly large orchestra but googling tells me it is a chamber piece. Is there more than one version? Confused of St Albans.]

George - Grabstein isn't really for a full-on orchestra, more a large chamber ensemble (but I wouldn't call it a chamber piece). It's the one with a very quiet solo guitar, playing mostly open-string arpeggios, and the antiphonal groups of football whistles, airhorns, etc. that always scare the bejesus out of an unsuspecting audience.

Stele is a more conventional large orchestral set up. I occasionally get the two mixed up though, because they're both 'Gravestone' pieces, and they're both on that Abbado recording of Gruppen.

"George - Grabstein isn't really for a full-on orchestra, more a large chamber ensemble (but I wouldn't call it a chamber piece)"

A chamber orchestra?

See "Grabstein" always catches me off-guard time and time again bcz, like much of Kurtag, I tend to listen to it very occasionally.

His music isn't at all like Webern's, but bcz they share similar lengths and they concentrate so well I don't tend to go for it as often but I'm always glad when I do.