If there is an avant-garde Vallhalla
where composers are placed according to their heroic acts of iconoclasm, the
Hungarian composer György Kurtág may in due course occupy a somewhat lowly
place at the table. His constant reference to the past of music and his own
past would seem to cast him more as post-modernist than as modernist, and
this view may be valid in a strict sense of the term as meaning "after
modernism". However, as I have argued elsewhere, his music can be understood
not so much as a direct product of, or reaction to, the avant-garde in music,
but more in terms of the ideas of modern-ism as they apply in literature.
This article continues this line of thinking, and examines Kurtág's concept
of the work from the point of view of a book by the literary theorist and
novelist Umberto Eco, which appeared in Italian as Opera Aperta in 1962 and
in English translation as The Open Work only in 1989. This is an idea associated
with Kurtág by his editor and musical collaborator András Wilheim in an article
form, and although Wilheim doesn't mention Eco specifically, his use of the
Latin phrase "opera aperta", the original title of Eco's book, would
suggest some knowledge of it. In his article, Wilheim describes some of the
same tendencies I shall be examining, but his main aim is to uncover what
he sees as a continued concern with unity of the art-work in Kurtág's music.
Although it would be tempting to take this view as authoritative, given the
closeness of Wilheim's relationship with Kurtág, I find the attachment to
a traditional idea of the importance of the "work" concept in Kurtág
unsatisfying.
Eco's main focus is literary, but he begins with an examination of some contemporary
works of music-Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI, Berio's Sequenza I for solo
flute, Henri Pousseur's Scambi, and Pierre Boulez's third Piano Sonata-tracing
the idea of "openness" in the work of art from its beginnings in Symbolist
poetry and the modernist literature of the early part of the twentieth century
to these indeterminate and aleatory works of the post-war avant-garde in music.
The idea of closure, of course, is deeply ingrained in the symbolic content
of classical music in the form of the concept of the cadence. The British
use of the term "cadence" for the harmonic closure of a musical phrase is
etymologically only distantly related to the notion of closure, via the Latin
cadere [to fall-i.e. to fall to a resting place], but the American use of
"full close" and "half close" reveals the cadence's links with the notion
of closure more clearly. German Schluss, and Hungarian zárlat similarly show
this linkage. In more chromatic tonal works, the cadence was the first progression
to be effaced or obscured, so it is not surprising to see the opposite idea
of "openness" being applied to the music and literature of the twentieth century
and immediately preceding decades.
While the main thrust of Eco's book is to describe an identity between the
various forms of the "open work", it will be useful for our purposes to distinguish
between them, and to examine the occurrences of these different forms of the
open work in Kurtág's music, so that on the one hand, his music may be compared
with the avant-garde music which was contemporary with his early works, and
on the other with the literary heritage which contributed to his aesthetic.
Moreover, the examples given by Eco are often of writers set or read by Kurtág
himself, such as Joyce, Kafka, Beckett and Musil.
Three
forms of openness
Eco distinguishes between three forms
of openness in the work of art. The first is on the level of interpretation:
while all works of art are capable of bearing a number of interpretations,
the open work is one in which there are no established codes for their interpretation.
For Eco, the openness of Modernist literature (such as Symbolist poetry) is
distinguished from medieval openness by the absence of fixed interpretative
registers, which he gives, quoting Dante, as the literal, the allegorical,
the moral and the anagogical.5 In medieval literature, no interpretations
may exist beyond these four registers-that is the code by which writings were
interpreted. Modernist literature has no such pre-established codes by which
it is to be interpreted, and indeed, what marks the modernist artist out from
the pre-modernist artist is the artist's awareness of the artwork as inevitably
giving a "field of possibilities" of interpretation. Rather than
seeking to limit those possibilities (through an established code of interpretation,
and so on), the artist actively seeks the openness that is implicit in all
artworks. Eco gives as an example of this active seeking of openness of interpretation
in the absence of pre-established codes the poetry of Verlaine and Mallarmé,
and the novels of Kafka, which have been described (especially by Lukács)
as "allegorical", but which yield, says Eco:
no confirmation in an encyclopedia, no matching paradigm in
the cosmos, to provide a key to the symbolism. The various existentialist,
theological, clinical and psychoanalytical interpretations of Kafka's cannot
exhaust all the possibilities of his works.
The second form of openness Eco describes is on the level of the semantic
content. This is a somewhat problematic idea as applied to music, since it
is proverbially uncertain what the semantic content-what the "real-world meaning"-of
music may be. Nevertheless, Eco uses serial music as an example of this semantic
openness, comparing it to the verbal puns of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake,
by which two, three, or even ten different etymological roots
are combined in such a way that a single word can set up a knot of different
submeanings, each of which in turn coincides and interrelates with other local
allusions, which are themselves "open" to new configurations and probabilities
of interpretation.
Serial music is composed using a particular arrangement usually of the 12
possible semitones as the organising principle, and hence often implies several
continuations or contexts at once. Henri Pousseur describes the listener to
contemporary music (contemporary with the late 1950's and early 1960's that
is), which disrupts the usual "term-to-term determination" of music, placing
himself "in the midst of an inexhaustible network of relationships" and choosing
for himself his own "modes of approach, his reference points and his scale."
Leaving aside the difficult problem of whether "logical-sounding continuation"
of musical material can be compared with the semantic content of language-in
other words, whether music's meaning lies in the apparent logic of its continuation-we
should also recognize that the difference between the first two forms of openness
in the work is one of degree: Kafka and the Symbolists may disrupt our normal
sense of narrative form, or of logical continuation, through the use of unorthodox
symbolism, or ambiguity, but this is not a difference in kind from the kind
of disruption which occurs in Joyce's use of pun. This recognition will help
us to develop a theory of the open work applied to Kurtág's own musical symbolism.
The third kind of openness Eco perceives is that of the "work in movement"
[opere in movimento], which he identifies at the start of his book. This is
exemplified by Mallarmé's Livres, in which the order
of the poems in this unfinished-both serendipitously and intentionally "unfinished"-work
is left undetermined; and also by two of the pieces of music he referred to
at the start of The Open Work. Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI requires the
pianist to choose between a number of groupings of notes, to create a sequence
of his own devising from among these notes. And in Boulez's third Piano Sonata,
the first section of which is made up of ten different passages on unordered
sheets of paper, which may be freely re-ordered, although not all permutations
are permitted.
Kurtág's
closed forms
As we have seen, the notion of closure (and hence opening) is fundamental
to tonal music. But the idea of a phrase being left open or made to close
persists even in post-tonal works, and some analogous convention is necessary
for composers who, while avoiding the tonal system, seek to cast their music
in the form of complete and self-contained works. Many examples of this can
be found in Bartók, for example, where the descent onto a particular note
which has been functioning as a "tonal centre" often has the force
of a perfect cadence (or "full close")-one might take the end of
the first movement of Bartók's fifth String Quartet as an example of this,
although in Bartók the technique is so widespread as to obviate the need for
single examples. As one might expect from a composer who self-confessedly
regards Bartók as his "mother-tongue", Kurtág's works reveal instances
of this same desire for the "closure" of a musical phrase. Simone
Hohmaier has provided a cogent account of the presence of this idea in the
sketches for Kurtág's Bornemisza Péter mondásai, Opus 7 (1963-8) -sketches
which overtly relate the idea of closedness and openness to both his own melodic
material and that of Bartók.
The notion of Kurtág as a composer embracing open interpretation or free choice
in interpretation of his works sits somewhat uncomfortably with the idea we
have of him as a teacher: generations of musicians and students will testify
that to Kurtág, music and especially his own music means something extremely
specific. He will often rehearse the opening phrase of a piece over and over,
obsessively criticizing the performers until it recreates in almost superhuman
accuracy the specific gesture he has in mind, and in such situations he is
extremely intolerant of interpretations which conflict with his own. Similarly,
the piece that marked Kurtág's "new beginning" in 1959-his opus
1 String Quartet, written after he had rejected the products of his early
compositional years following his stay in Paris during the years 1957-8-shows
a marked "closure" of form, similar to that of the Bartók quartets.
The piece shows a symmetrical arch-structure over the whole of the form, and
moreover the third movement of this work features a strongly emphasized G
sharp pedal (see bars 28-43), which is mirrored in the D pedal with which
the last movement ends. This again mirrors Bartók's use of tonal centres to
create a closed, "organic" form: the interval between these two
tonal centres in the Kurtág quartet, the tritone (consisting of six semitones,
or three whole tone steps) is the interval which Bartók uses to indicate opposite
and equal poles in music, such as in the first movement of the fifth string
quartet, or in the first movement of the Music for Strings, Percussion and
Celesta.
