Homage à György Kurtág

via https://interlude.hk/gyorgy-kurtag-born-on-february-19-1926-fragments-of-intensity/

Thursday 19 February will be György Kurtág’s 100^th birthday. An inspiration. Homage, profound respect. I feel a sense of enormous privilege to be alive at the same time as he is, and is still composing, elsewhere on this planet. In Budapest they will be performing his most recent work, a one-act opera. I shall be immersing myself in the string and piano music.

I like this appraisal on Juliette Liu’s Interlude website:

‘Kurtág stands as a composer of radical restraint. His music demonstrates that scale is not a measure of depth, and that a single sound can carry the weight of memory, emotion, and thought. His miniatures confirm that intensity, not abundance, is the true measure of artistic power’.

One of the lessons I’ve absorbed from Kurtág is to be reconciled with the problem that a work may seem never to be finished—whether published / performed or not—and to embrace opportunities continually to refine and revise, to explore alternative versions, to be prepared to re-use material without devaluing it.

And I often revisit this particular interview quotation, for its guiding wisdom:

‘You can churn out easy rhymes and easy rhythms… [But] if the material offers no resistance, you are in great danger’.*

Thank you György, keep on keeping on.

* Balint Andras Varga (2009). Gyorgy Kurtag: three interviews and Ligeti homages. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, p72.

Bad literary education

The narrator sits with her daughter.

“After a few failed attempts at drawing something, she asks me to make four squares for her—two at the top, two at the bottom—and instructs me to label them in this order: ‘Character’, ‘Setting’, ‘Problem’, ‘Solution’. When I finish labelling the four squares and ask what they’re for, she explains that at school, they taught her to tell stories this way. Bad literary education begins too early and continues for way too long” (Valeria Luiselli, Lost children archive, 2020, p61).

More on the artist-intermediary tension

(Previously: On category obsession disorder)

Further to my thoughts on the potential or real influence of intermediaries on an artist’s work…

According to Tom Keymer (2020), we might never have heard of Jane Austen, her novels never published at all, “had she not met the market halfway” (Jane Austen: writing, society, politics).

I find this a little disturbing (although I'd want a bit more specificity around the term 'halfway'). It seems to suggest that Austen's exquisite precision of language was shaped to a significant degree by market forces. Really?