Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Sense of the Fragmentary in Kurtág's Several Movements from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Scrapbooks, Op. 37a

The Sense of the Fragmentary in Kurtág's Several Movements from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's... One of the most distinctive developments in György Kurtág's output from the beginning of the 1980s is his setting of incomplete texts. He entitles these songs ‘fragments’, suggesting that they are musical scraps that accompany the extracts from great writers’ works. Kurtág's most representative contribution to this genre is his chamber song cycle Kafka‐Fragments, Op. 24, for soprano and violin (1986). Slightly over a decade later, Kurtág selected 22 aphorisms by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and set them in a new vocal chamber cycle for soprano and double bass as Several Movements from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Scrapbooks (Op. 37a, 1999). To date, most scholars interested in the fragmentary qualities of Kurtág's songs have focused on Op. 24, leaving Op. 37a relatively unexplored. This article corrects this imbalance by providing analyses of three movements from Op. 37a. I approach these songs from the angles of text setting, pitch structure and melodic contour to show how Kurtág utilises these elements to achieve the defining features of ambiguity and incompletion central to the musical fragment. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Music Analysis Wiley

The Sense of the Fragmentary in Kurtág's Several Movements from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Scrapbooks, Op. 37a

Music Analysis , Volume 41 (3) – Oct 1, 2022

Loading next page...
 
/lp/wiley/the-sense-of-the-fragmentary-in-kurt-g-s-several-movements-from-georg-u7uyWCnnq0

References (46)

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
Music Analysis © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
ISSN
0262-5245
eISSN
1468-2249
DOI
10.1111/musa.12201
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

One of the most distinctive developments in György Kurtág's output from the beginning of the 1980s is his setting of incomplete texts. He entitles these songs ‘fragments’, suggesting that they are musical scraps that accompany the extracts from great writers’ works. Kurtág's most representative contribution to this genre is his chamber song cycle Kafka‐Fragments, Op. 24, for soprano and violin (1986). Slightly over a decade later, Kurtág selected 22 aphorisms by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and set them in a new vocal chamber cycle for soprano and double bass as Several Movements from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Scrapbooks (Op. 37a, 1999). To date, most scholars interested in the fragmentary qualities of Kurtág's songs have focused on Op. 24, leaving Op. 37a relatively unexplored. This article corrects this imbalance by providing analyses of three movements from Op. 37a. I approach these songs from the angles of text setting, pitch structure and melodic contour to show how Kurtág utilises these elements to achieve the defining features of ambiguity and incompletion central to the musical fragment.

Journal

Music AnalysisWiley

Published: Oct 1, 2022

There are no references for this article.