Book Series Contemporary Composers, vol. 7

Perspectives on the Music of György Kurtág

Performance, Language and Memory

Rachel Beckles Willson, Gergely Fazekas (eds)

  • Pages: xii + 251 p.
  • Size:210 x 270 mm
  • Illustrations:14 tables b/w., 37 musical examples
  • Language(s):English
  • Publication Year:2025


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This book is dedicated to György Kurtág, the last representative of a great generation of composers who emerged after World War II

BIO

Rachel Beckles Willson is Professor of Intercultural Performing Arts at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University. She has a hybrid professional arts practice as multi-instrumentalist, composer and scholar. Her early books focused on contemporary music of Hungary («György Kurtág, The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza», 2004, and «Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War», 2007), while more recent interests range from colonialism («Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West», 2013) to the cultural life of musical instruments («The Oud: An Illustrated History», 2023).

Gergely Fazekas is a Hungarian musicologist, associate professor at the Liszt Academy (Budapest). He has published scholarly articles in Hungarian, English and French musicological journals on Bach, Debussy and Kurtág. His book «J. S. Bach and the Two Cultures of Musical Form» was published in Hungarian in 2018. He spent the academic year 2017/2018 as a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Bard College (NY). He is the musical advisor of the documentary film «Kurtág- Fragments», which will be released in 2025.

Summary

György Kurtág, who is still active at the age of 99, is the last representative of a great generation of composers who emerged after World War II. A legendary chamber music coach and source of inspiration for composers and musicians around the world, with a compositional output spanning more than 70 years, Kurtág is widely regarded as one of the most original musical minds of our time. In this volume, scholars from three continents come together to explore Kurtág’s music and its shifting contexts. Some of the articles deal with theoretical questions. How can his music be placed within the framework of the 21st century? How does the concept of “lateness” or “Central Europe” define the nature and reception of his works? How can philosophical concepts such as Deuleuze and Guattari's “rhizome”, or social theorist Manuel Castells' "space of flows", contribute to our understanding of Kurtág’s music? And how can we understand Kurtág’s unique relationships with performers and, more generally, with performance? Other articles focus in depth on particular historical periods in Kurtág’s life such as the early Romanian years, and communist Hungary in the 1950s. There are also fresh discussions of specific genres, namely unaccompanied solo vocal pieces, and the series of short piano pieces referring to a phrase that is now emblematic in Kurtág's universe, “Virág az ember” (Flowers we are).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Rachel Beckles Willson – Gergely Fazekas

Performers and Performances

Translating Kurtág into Kurtág: From Practice to Product
Rachel Beckles Willson

Extrovert or Internal Performativity? Tactile Gestures in Kurtág’s Four-Hand Works
Cecilia Oinas

Who is Miyako? Explorations of the ‘Virág az ember…’ Series and the Significance of ‘…Mijakónak’
Nobuhiro Ito

Past and Present

György Kurtág’s Time in Romania and Its Impact on His Personality and Work
Iulia Mogoșan

The ‘Order of Composers’ and Its Reluctant Member, György Kurtág: Social and Institutional Aspects of Composition in State Socialist Hungary
Lóránt Péteri

Difference and Repetition in György Kurtág’s Petite musique solennelle en hommage à Pierre Boulez 90 (2015)
Julia Galieva-Szokolay

Lenses on Lateness: Style, Form and History in György Kurtág’s …concertante…
Mark Hutchinson – Martin Scheuregger

Kurtág and the Twenty-First Century
Tim Rutherford-Johnson

The Drama of Languages

The Unaccompanied Voice in the Works of György Kurtág
Peter Laki

Story Time: Towards György Kurtág’s Fin de partie
Anita Rákóczy

Kurtág’s Music and the Concept of Central Europe
Gergely Fazekas

Abstracts and Biographies
Index of Names