György Kurtág – Signs (1961)

Why on earth did Kurtág withdraw this piece?  It sounds good to me!  The first two movements in particular are a worthy successor to Webern — striking, aphoristic, atonal miniatures, by turns playful and violent (or maybe both at once), where every note feels like the right one.  The fifth, with its odd diversion into oom-pah rhythm (or is that an allusion to 19th-century virtuoso string music and its plethora of double stops?), is pretty cool too.

For the purposes of this paper, though, the go-to movement is #3.  Maybe it’s just because the composer is Hungarian, but I hear this movement as an extension of Bartók’s “night music” movements, particularly the one in Out of Doors (1926).  Technically, though, it has a lot in common with Saariaho’s music:  there are sul ponticello harmonics, tremolos between natural and artificial harmonics, trills between artificial harmonics and normally played notes… in one passage the violist has to simultaneously play the open C string, play a trill a sixth higher, play a Morse-code-ish rhythm on the open A string, and play a treble-clef G as a harmonic.  I don’t even know how that’s possible!  (Maybe some violist will comment and tell me what string you play that G harmonic on.)  The effect starts out ghostly, but becomes quite harsh as the dynamic increases.  Really, the more I think about it the more amazed at how Saariaho-like it is.

I should listen to more Kurtág.  I remember being thoroughly baffled by …quasi una fantasia… (1988) a few years ago, but a lot of music that seemed difficult to me then doesn’t anymore.

List of extended techniques used:  sul pont, sul tasto, glissandi, pizzicato glissandi, left-hand pizz, Bartók pizz, various kinds of harmonics.