Fragment, Time and Memory: Unity in Kurtág's Kafka Fragments

Abstract

György Kurtág (b. 1926) is a composer whose concern with fragmentation runs deep into individual pieces, whilst seeming to splinter his oeuvre. His relatively select number of works includes many that manifestly deal with the notion of ‘the fragment’: the pinnacle of these is his Op. 24, Kafka Fragments (1985–1986). Memory and time play an important role in a listener's understanding of this work, as the music is woven together by temporally-dislocated connections and timeless associations. Perceptual, analytical and compositional precedents are taken as a starting point for creating a framework in which the notion of fragmentation in Kurtág's music might be understood.

Keywords:

• Kurtág
• Analysis
• Time
• Memory
• Fragments
• Nonlinear

Notes

1 Metzer writes of the disruption or reversal of a truth present in an aphoristic statement seen in movements of Kafka Fragments (2011, p. 128).

2 Some modernist composers have taken this approach on board in their music: Taruskin comments, in relation to the Schenkerian method, ‘composers trained to analyze that way might try to ceonceptualize [the analysis] in composing' (2005, p. 512).

3 Taruskin provides a succinct explanation of these ideas, distilled from Levinson (2006).

4 Fink (1999) comments:

After tonality, a tonal surface, however well-behaved, can never again have the inevitability of ‘natural law’, and thus can never again give the impression of following necessarily from a single, fundamental, deep structure. (You can induce Pandora to close her box again—but I wouldn't turn my back on her for a minute.) (p. 131)

5 During his time in Paris (1957–1958), Kurtág laboriously and lovingly copied Webern's works by hand: see Beckles Willson (2004, p. 32).

6 Movements are referred to in the form section.movement within section (3.6: sixth mvt. of section 3).

7 3.6 finishes 29′42″ in, leaving 3.7 to start the remaining 29′38″ (Banse & Keller, 2006 [CD]).

8 All durations come from Banse and Keller (2006). This thorough interpretation, supervised by the composer, seems the most accurate representation of the composer's intentions and provides data relating to duration in seconds and minutes, which the score cannot.

9 This balance of opposites is similarly found in the Hungarian language and its literature (see Williams, 1999, pp. 141–150).