Random Shuffle 24: Játékok
Hommage à Soproni, György Kurtág
from Játékok, volume IV (2:10)
György and Márta Kurtág, piano
I sometimes forget how influenced my own music is by Kurtág. This wonderful short piece for four hands is type of thing I wish I’d written, but Kurtág beat me to it. Damn.
I had a lot of books on music when I was a kid, and among the ones I read most avidly - almost obsessively - was Harold Schonberg’s The Lives of the Great Composers. He was of the school of thought, still alarmingly popular among critics, music lovers and even musicians, that, in the last hundred years or so, music just got worse and worse. And, of course, it fell into steep decline in the last forty years or so, after the death of Stravinsky. (Stravinsky he allows into the pantheon, but with some reluctance. [I no longer keep the the book with me, so I can’t quote exactly.] He says, in effect, “Stravinsky’s great, but his music isn’t for everyone.” As though Beethoven is for everyone! Give me a break, Harold.)
Anyway, near the end he says something like: “But, in these last years of the 20th century, there is no clear heir to the line of great composers stretching from Monteverdi to Stravinsky…” This is a criminal (and ignorant) thing for someone of Schonberg’s stature to say. He is, to use the media parlance (of our times, ahem), an “opinion-maker.” Some people don’t think for themselves, and simply go along with what the famous former music critic for the New York Times tells them to think.
The point is: I am baffled by this complaint. There are dozens of great composers alive right now, working in all different styles and languages. I felt moved to start on this rant because I feel so strongly that Kurtág is a prime example. Játékok is a uniquely extensive, fascinating and varied contribution to piano literature; his string quartets are among the finest since Bartók; his feel for the human voice, and his sympathy for authors such as Kafka, Hölderlin and Beckett, puts his vocal music in a class of its own.
Or what of Dutilleux, another sadly overlooked composer - 90+, but still writing? Is there a better cello concerto in the whole of music than Tout un Monde Lointain? Or, in all seriousness, a better string quartet than Ainsi la Nuit?
How about Andriessen? And Reich and Adams? And the controversial, but consistently fascinating, work of Carter and Boulez? And the dreamscapes of Saariaho and Murail? How to account for the accessible, Romantic Neruda Songs, Peter Lieberson’s masterpiece?
In fact, I suspect that there is as much, if not more, great music being written now than at any point in music history. The trouble is that “style” is so decentralized, so it’s hard to know where to begin one’s survey, or where to end. All of the composers I mentioned are maximally technical capable within the language they’ve developed. And each of their languages is strong and distinct. There is hardly a bar of Dutilleux that could be a bar of Kurtág, or even a bar of Adams that could be a bar of Reich.