Ligeti’s Traces in Kurtág’s String Quartet Op. 1

Reviewed by: Shostakovich: A Coded Life in Music by Brian Morton Cameron Pyke Shostakovich: A Coded Life in Music. By Brian Morton. London: Haus Publishing, 2021. [220 p. ISBN 978-1-913368-43-2. £9.99] The appearance of the first paperback edition of this 2006 volume is to be welcomed. Morton presents a clear overview of the composer's life while navigating and synthesising the key contours of the considerable scholarly literature. He draws upon a broad cultural understanding: there are perceptive references, for example, to Olivier Messiaen and Arnold Schoenberg as well as to Arshile Gorky and Boris Pasternak. While the author acknowledges that he is not a musicologist, a significant number of key works are discussed in terms of their music, as well as underlying meaning: this is particularly the case with the symphonies, which Morton identifies as 'the form in which his essence as a composer would be expressed' (p. 40), acknowledging that some works are 'capacious enough to sustain any number of contradictory interpretations' (p. 46). Morton's discussions of the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and Symphony No. 8 are particularly sensitive. Reporting the composer's excitement at the film version of Lady Macbeth (released in 1966–1967 as Katerina Ismailova), Morton comments that it was 'as if his entire musical history were somehow embedded in that great work's narrative of cultural paucity, betrayal, defiance, violence, and imprisonment' (p. 202). In contrast, Symphony No. 8 is viewed as 'a meditation on the whole idea of symphonism … a return to the modernist experiment of the equally unloved Fourth Symphony' (p. 124). Both arguments could be extended: the sympathetically drawn Katerina re-emerges in the tragic figure of Loreley in Symphony No. 14, while the composer's wider tendency to subvert symphonic form, as in the 'problematic' Symphony No. 6 (p. 105) culminates in Symphony No. 15, in the final coda of which, as the late Alexander Ivashkin argued, symphonic syntax is itself eroded. Morton himself notes 'a steadily deepening absorption in sound itself' in some of the late period works (p. 189). Morton correctly identifies the key characteristics of the composer's genius: his ability to write music, often under considerable psychological pressure, which could operate on different levels; his sardonic exploitation, drawn from Gustav Mahler and Nikolai Gogol, of the full potential of juxtaposition; his profound sense of social and ethical duty; and his stature 'among the very greatest exponents – and perhaps the last greatest exponent – of what we still uneasily call classical music' (p. 24). In presenting 'a straightforward narrative of the composer's life and the evolution of his music' (p. 22) and emphasising 'a basic consistency of attitude' (p. 14), more could have been made of what Edison Denisov called the 'arch' between the early and late works: for example, the 'unexpected revival' (Denisov) of percussion in the coda of the Cello Concerto No. 2 and subsequently. Indeed, the discussion of the 'late period' works is more cursory than that of the earlier and middle-period scores. Moreover, while Morton earlier acknowledges the 'intermingling of major works in his mind with smaller-scale works' (p. 150), it is in these final works that the cross-referencing becomes a significant stylistic feature in itself, as if the composer increasingly sought to create a personal narrative on his entire creative output, towards much of which he seems to have felt a profound dissatisfaction. I would not, then, agree that the works of the last decade are 'less obviously encrypted' (p. 199), particularly when one considers the chamber music, and notwithstanding the composer's partial return to word setting. I would also have valued acknowledgement of the influence of Gavriil Nikolayevich Popov (on Symphony No. 4) and of Mieczysław Weinberg (on the later string quartets). [End Page 347] The book is written in an accessible style, though on occasion sensationalist phrasing sits uneasily with its erudition and seriousness of purpose, and some will also find references to Shostakovich's numerology more convincing than others. The lack of footnotes and an index likewise do not do justice to the range and clarity of the book's cultural reference. Shostakovich's visit...

IN THE LIVES OF great artists, the late or last works are often considered to be the greatest, the flowering or crowning of all that came before. This phenomenon, the valuing of “late” creations, artistic creations in particular, is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in connection with Beethoven. The late works, especially the late quartets, late piano sonatas, and the last symphony (the Ninth), are much discussed, much performed, and highly prized. In the case of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131 (1826), this canonization is everywhere apparent. The work is not only firmly a part of the scholarly canon, the performing canon, and the pedagogical canon, but also makes its presence felt in popular culture, notably in film (for example, ...

This interview with Elliott Carter, conducted on 30 May 2012, is among the last that he gave. Carter talks candidly about his past, the present, and what his legacy will be. While discussing his latest works – a series of short epigrams and a new setting of Wallace Stevens poems – Carter explains how each composition is a unique musical adventure; consequently, he does not repeat himself. Innovation is the essence of Carter's oeuvre, clearly manifested in his string quartets, which Carter still views as his grandest musical statements. He speaks openly about the difficulties of getting these and other works performed well, the lack of performances of his compositions on the West Coast, and the current trends and direction of composition today. Carter recalls important experiences and events in his life involving Nadia Boulanger, Ives, Cage, Boulez, and Stravinsky.

An Interview with György Ligeti in Hamburg. Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 10, numéro 1, 1990, p. 1-126) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The place of nature in Godard's late films

One of the great advantages of Schenkerian theory for the analysis of sonata-form expositions is its focus on the comparatively few fundamental structural patterns that govern the vast majority of Classical sonata movements. By recognizing these pervasive patterns, the analyst is able to relate unique foreground and middleground features of an individual exposition to the relatively uniform background procedures. One thus gains insight both into the features that make a given exposition original and into those that tie it to the sonata-form genre. In this paper I shall study expositions from the first movements of three late Haydn works: the Symphony No. 96 (1791), the String Quartet op. 74/3 (1793), and the String Quartet op. 76/2 (1797). My aim is to demonstrate how the voice-leading of the foreground and middleground is related to structural patterns operating in the background, and how the different structural levels interact with the movements' formal organization.

One of the great advantages of Schenkerian theory for the analysis of sonata-form expositions is its focus on the comparatively few fundamental structural patterns that govern the vast majority of Classical sonata movements. By recognizing these pervasive patterns, the analyst is able to relate unique foreground and middleground features of an individual exposition to the relatively uniform background procedures. One thus gains insight both into the features that make a given exposition original and into those that tie it to the sonata-form genre. In this paper I shall study expositions from the first movements of three late Haydn works: the Symphony No. 96 (1791), the String Quartet op. 74/3 (1793), and the String Quartet op. 76/2 (1797). My aim is to demonstrate how the voice-leading of the foreground and middleground is related to structural patterns operating in the background, and how the different structural levels interact with the movements' formal organization.

The essay is devoted to characterizing a trend opposed to the onslaught of contradictions, disharmony and various destructive influences brought along by the new century in the Russian musical art of the early 20th century. This trend was embodied in the composers’ turn to the humanistic traditions of the past, as well as in the constructive and positive aspirations of modernity. The desire to defend the principles of humanism was mainly associated with the spiritual values of the Classical era. In particular, the author provides insight into the formation of neoclassicism in Russian musical art starting with the late works by P. Tchaikovsky (the orchestral suite “Mozartiana” (1887)). Special attention is paid to the works by S. Taneyev (the cantata “At the Reading of a Psalm” (1912-1915)), N. Myaskovsky (String Quartet No. 4 (1909-1910)), S. Prokofiev (Symphony No. 1 (1917)), Z. Paliashvili (the operas “Abesalom da Eteri” (1910-1919) and “Daisi” (1919-1923)). As a result, it is concluded that the sphere of humanism and harmony, despite being hardly a central trend in the context of the musical and artistic process of the 1910s, was, however, undoubtedly significant, clearly reflecting the reaction to the deforming trends of modernity. The fundamental shift in worldview that occurred in the 1910s – the first half of the 1920s was expressed in the weakening of the considered trend, the growth of contradictions.

A new reading of the finale of Beethoven's String Quartet in C# Minor, op. 131, taking as point of departure the theme in "doublet" form introduced in mm. 22-29. This theme recalls (or retrieves) the fugue subject of the first movement in peculiar ways, analyzed here in perhaps painstaking detail. Over the course of the movement the peculiarities dissipate; the theme recurs in different forms until, in a beautiful passage near the end, it seems less uncanny than reconciliatory, an authentic return at the end of the quartet to the ethos of the great fugue that began it. Meanwhile as the doublet theme develops and grows more expressive, the finale's "heroic" first theme decays. Yet the finale is the only movement in op. 131 to follow sonata-like procedures, strikingly evocative of the "Burnham canon" of middle-period works. Sonata-form narrative is undercut here by a counter-narrative tracing the transformations of the doublet theme, suggesting an overall cyclic rather than teleological dynamic. For Adorno, critique of the heroic ideal was at the heart of Beethoven's late style. Although Adorno did not think so, critique is more explicit in the finale of op. 131 than in many other late works, it is suggested, and more vivid, because the heroic accents of the symphonic style are evoked so deliberately within the movement itself.

It would seem that the string quartet as a genre is not central to Nielsen’s oeuvre, at least if we consider the F major Quartet op. 44 as his only mature work for the medium. But this picture changes as soon as we count not merely his early apprentice works but also the three further quartets to which Nielsen himself assigned opus numbers and which he had published. After the early quartet studies, in which his familiarity with the classical repertoire may be seen, the following quartets – op. 13, op. 5 and op. 14 – show a progressive emancipation from tradition, which is particularly evident in their harmonic relationships. As the texture becomes far more complex, so the harmonic language achieves an increasing differentiation, going as far as bitonal passages in the E flat Quartet op. 14 (1897-98). The F major Quartet op. 44, composed in 1906, appears as a logical consequence, in that it unites the transparency of the early studies with the fluctuating tonality that thereafter becomes the basis for Nielsen’s output. From this perspective the string quartets acquire a central position, since they reflect his development more clearly than other genres. Moreover, they occupy a unique position when viewed not just against the background of Nielsen’s late works but in the context of the general history of the genre before 1900.

I. String Quartet II In the summer of 1996, the Kronos Quartet was scheduled to present Morton Feldman’s String Quartet II (1983) at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York. The performance was being promoted as the centerpiece of a much larger Feldman tribute and retrospective that was to go on for several days. Feldman’s legendary quartet had never before been given in its entirety, which, if faithfully done would last, uninterrupted, around six hours. Shorter versions had been performed in the 1980s—in Toronto, in Darmstadt—abridged by Feldman himself to fit specific programs, or to accommodate the pleas of musicians, but the composition in all its intended dimension had not been heard. Like a well-concealed object, the complete string quartet’s non-performance seemed only to heighten the anticipation and the uniqueness of the upcoming event, the silence surrounding this monumental piece contributing to its growing aura. No one had heard it, and yet much had been heard about it. More than any other contemporary composer, Feldman over the years had become known for the length of so many of his pieces, their extreme duration seen as both a compositional strategy and a recognizable signature statement of his late work. Asked about it, he would sometimes cryptically justify the unusual length of his music as his way of adding “a little drama” to the work, or that he was “tired of the bourgeois audience” and their conventional expectations, or, more seriously perhaps, he would quote Varese’s comment that people “don’t understand how long it takes for a sound to speak” (Give My Regards 44). And though much of Feldman’s music of the late 1970s and 1980s ranged from one hour to four (breaking what he saw as the stale durational mold of

In this third edition of the classic Verdi, renowned authority Julian Budden offers a comprehensive overview of Verdi the man and the artist, tracing his ascent from humble beginnings to the status of a cultural patriarch of the new Italy, whose cause he had done much to promote, and demonstrating the gradual enlargement over the years of his artistic vision. This concise study is an accessible, insightful, and engaging summation of Verdi scholarship, acquainting the non-specialist with the personal details Verdi's life, with the operatic world in which he worked, and with his political ideas, his intellectual vision, and his powerful means of communicating them through his music. In his survey of the music itself, Budden emphasizes the unique character of each work as well as the developing sophistication of Verdi's style. He covers all of the operas, the late religious works, the songs, and the string quartet. A glossary explains even the most obscure operatic terms current in Verdi's time.

Reflections on a Musical Performance: Staging a Dialogue between Beethoven and Stevens Mark Steinberg HISTORY SOMETIMES MAKES brothers of artists far separated by years. A flame can burn and then catch fire again generations later, a shared interest finding its energy taken up and vibrating anew. Many are those who have investigated our emotional landscape, whose revelations make us feel less alone and more noble. Rarer is the artist who grapples as well with our process of coming to know the world. Our own thinking is often mysterious to us, and we frequently recognize beauty in the fait accompli without knowing what led us there. The late works of Ludwig van Beethoven and much of the poetry of Wallace Stevens, however, seem to engage vitally with the way in which our thinking helps us form the world as we know it. This is the idea behind an experimental and investigative performance my group, the Brentano String Quartet, put on at the 92nd St. Y in New York City in March of 2019. During a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, lines of poetry by Stevens were projected on a screen behind the quartet, fading in and out to correspond with events in the music. The text was projected just a bit at a time, full ideas brought to completion only over prolonged moments, as if being mulled over in the mind of the listener, summoned by the music. We made an attempt to have the music and poetry cohabit, neither usurping the attention completely, the two arts held in a fertile suspension. The music doesn’t need the words and the words don’t need the music, but we thought they shared enough between them to illuminate each other in some fashion, creating a new amalgam adding dimension to both. ________ During the intermission, before the start of the music, the audience sees these lines from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,”1 priming them for the idea of art as an investigative tool: [End Page 168] the theoryOf poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands. (CPP 415) Beethoven in what is generally referred to as his late period often writes a sort of meta-music—music in which we can sense the process of creating music, and in which that process tells us about our ability to conjure sense from the world. Stevens, likewise, seems to write often about poetry itself, to meander in real time through the process of a poem’s taking shape, inviting us into the mind of the poet and sharing in his contemplations. This is precisely the sense I have always had in hearing the first movement of Op. 132. As when Stevens says that “the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life, // As it is,” so does Beethoven write music, which, if it has an “aboutness,” is about composing itself, about ordering abstract musical ideas, both following and manipulating them to make a form that is built before our eyes. The quartet begins with a motif that is a bit of an obsession for Beethoven in his late period, a four-note idea that is, perhaps, his version of Bach’s having spelled his own name in musical notes. And so he speaks of both the complexity and perfection of his predecessor and of the idea of self-reference. The four-note idea is set forth as a sort of postulate upon which to build. Already in the introduction of the piece, the idea comes both right side up and upside down and intertwines with itself. It will rarely be completely absent from the proceedings, as if the laws of logic and perception are controlling what might otherwise seem an almost random succession of thoughts. It suggests a clarity of eye that is Stevens’s “things as they are” (CPP 135). As this motif is first introduced, the projections show: This is how the wind shifts:Like the thoughts of an old human,Who still thinks eagerlyAnd...

By and large first movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in B6, op. 130, conforms to principles of sonata form. Departures from typical procedure, however, are frequent and striking. Nevertheless, as listeners we interpret movement in terms of style, and our aesthetic experience is shaped by our attempts to understand Beethoven's nonclassical compositional choices in terms of Classical ones he might have made. It was precisely this characteristic combination of conventional and unconventional that made Beethoven's late style all but incomprehensible to most nineteenth-century listeners. As Amanda Glauert has argued in a recent essay entitled The Double Perspective in Beethoven's Opus 131, late works stirred opposition because they threatened to expose artificialities of norms, by placing them in a questioning or ironic light. In her view, the notion of musical norms was particularly strong at time of Beethoven's apprenticeship, because it was supported by general belief in value of aligning oneself with existing order of things-whether this order was seen in terms of respect for artistic traditions, or respect for nature, human and external. But because music is nonrepresentational, it could not hope to achieve a genuine natural order. Rather, in music particular forms and expressive means were understood as incarnations of natural order; in short, stylistic conventions functioned as a kind of code of natural.'

Shevchenko's celebrations since their founding were demonstrations of national identity in terms of foreign domination, the act of demonstrating the unity of Ukrainians through creative expression. Since the first years of honoring the anniversary of the poet there have been combined concerts-academies, in their programs leading place belongs to the rants, choral works acappella, vocal and chamber compositions which are directly related to the poetic word. There are few orchestral and choral compositions because of the lack of substantial capacity among professionally trained performing forces. There are still less in programs of celebrations instrumental works: compositions for the piano, the violin, the bandura, the harp, the violin and the guitar, the string quartet. The best artistic forces are involved to their arranging as it is not so much about the national resistance to foreign oppression, but about the possibility of unification national community around ethical idea (and symbolic figure who embodies it) in the state system, where it appears as marginalized segment of society. The aim of the research is to consider the participation of pianists in Shevchenko`s celebrations of Ukrainian Diaspora centers in terms of their missions, programs, and the inspiration of the composer's creative figure and works of the poet in the piano genres of concert and didactic plan to position of similarity and differences from the general artistic processes on Ukrainian territories. An important aspect of presentation piano art in terms of Shevchenko's celebrations is to include not only compositions with piano accompaniment , but a purely instrumental works in the programs of concerts, parties, festivals, academies that set the special requirements to artists and performers. These particular samples of classics and the most modern Ukrainian piano literature, the performance of which is intended to show a decent level of professional piano forces of Ukrainians and provide collective programs with higher artistic level. Among participants of Shevchenko`s celebrations there are names from Europe, not only among Ukrainian, but also Polish, Czech , Austrian instrumentalists. Researchers of functioning Vienna Sich mention that leading Ukrainian professional musicians were often involved in its concert programs. A special group is instrumental compositions inspired by the works of the poet. Initiated by memorial opuses, they gradually formed a powerful bases of instrumental art specimens oriented on concert queries of those performers at home and among the Diaspora. Tonal basis of such compositions are folk songs on texts by Shevchenko, his favorite songs and popular works associated with honoring of the poet. An interesting phenomenon was the creation of songs for children audience and didactic plays of Shevchenko`s subject for Diaspora centers of children's music education. Examination representation of piano art in programs of Shevchenko`s celebrations of Diaspora environment allows to make a conclusion. Piano performance (solo, chamber, accomponist) in concert programs of Shevchenko`s celebrations in centers of Ukrainian Diaspora regardless of territorial move of the centers were represented by the best local and invited Ukrainian performers: Lyubka Kolessa (Canada), Roman Sawickij, Daria Hordynsky – Karanovych, Yuri Olijnyk, Vadym Kipa, Martha Kravtsiv- Barabash, Borys Maksymovych, R.Rudnytskyj, U.Osinchuk, M. Suk and others. It was characterized by consolidation efforts with foreign artists teachers, students and performers-beginners participated, they were able to gain performing experience and demonstrate citizenship in Shevchenko`s programs. Concert programs were formed on the basis of worlds classics performances (the professionalism was demonstrated by professional piano interpreters) first performance of latest works by Ukrainian artists (including Diaspora centers thanks to it popularization of national piano works on the international level was realized) as well as works connected with the works or personality of Shevchenko. Permanent sociocultural request works on this theme served as a powerful stimulus for the composer's creativity not only for concerts ( in solo, chamber and vocal and instrumental casts with piano), but also didactic literature. Availability and patriotic upbringing direction lay the foundations for conservation, the continuity and development of national traditions, including in the area of piano art.