Konstantin Lifschitz: Situating Performance & The Politics of Location

I was born in December 1976 in Kharkov, which back then was a city where everyone spoke Russian, but today my birthplace does not appear on the map of Russia. The coincidence of my birth in this ‘myth’ town has left me with a debt of explanation to non-Russians that I am not Ukrainian. It is mythological to me because anyone connecting me to this place has left it, including my parents, family and all of their acquaintances, dispersing to different corners of both this world and the next one. Now Kharkov appears in my consciousness somewhere between Chagall’s Vitebsk and the Tamara Gardens in the Nabokov novel... Music as a performing creative art on the piano did not begin for me with Mozart, Beethoven or Chopin, but with Rameau, whose ‘Tambourin’ I played for my very first concert as a four year-old. And it also began with J. S. Bach. [Eventually], I realized that my diction was a poetic one, but its intonation was not so much lyrical as it was ‘Virgil-like’, ‘remote’. In spite of (or because of—) the fact that fate has granted me encounters with a lot of eminent Musicians, I have always been on a search for my own plasticity as well as my own tools of expression.”
  —  Konstantin Lifschitz.

T  hese works need special consideration from a player who has been trained in a different norm of notation and performance. But there is as much latitude for interpretive variation in earlier music as in music of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries—in fact, there is often more.”
  —  Richard Troeger, Playing Bach at the Keyboard, p. 259.

Konstantin Lifschitz will perform on Friday evening in the Master Pianists Series at Friends of Chamber Music in Kansas City. In a program that also includes Beethoven Sonatas there will also be a generous helping of baroque:

• Frescobaldi: Three Toccatas
  
• Bach: Two Ricercars from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079 (Ricercar a 6; Ricercar a 3).

Lifschitz gives his playing intensely personal interpretations, “like a sort of self-revelation and eavesdropping” as Boston Globe reviewer Richard Dyer said of Lifshitz in a 14-JUL-2000 review. In that regard, Dyer and others have noted that ‘stile recitativo’ has prominent lyrical elements—“It was originally a lyrical form, not just declamatory like it is today.”

Originally, ricercars were ‘open-ended’. Baroque composers emulated Renaissance style for ‘stile antico’ effects. The ricercar began as an early proto-fugue with a slow opening. But it didn’t stay that way. Further permuting and stretching the ricercar idiom, in ‘A Musical Offering’ Bach gave the name ‘ricercar’ to pieces that have ‘galant’ or even later features.

In Lifschitz’s Bach and Frescobaldi we get a sense of the difference between ‘strict and learnèd fugues’ vs. ‘progressive and casual fugues’. He achieves a unique sort of ‘productive objectivity’—that strikes us like ‘facial contextualist’ readings of the constitution of some country that we are surprised to discover we have never visited. Maybe the place is ‘mythical’, its existence vehemently denied by the authorized political maps. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect it has to do with Lifschitz’s native, now-mythical Kharkov.


Once upon a time (more than 50 years ago), the relationship between being, thought, and language (such as the musical manuscript written by a composer) was completely ‘grounded’. So grounded that people took it for granted—like it was ‘built-in’, a ‘given’. The total and obligate ‘contingency’ of all human discourse—including discourse in music—wasn’t appreciated. Even piano technique was less diverse then than it is now.

Then came post-modernism and deconstruction and other influences, and discourses were suddenly thought of as existential acting-out by the subjects, who disclose their personal engagements with the world and reveal how they are ‘inscribed’ by the world right back. Questions about what is ‘real’ center today more around inner conditions of human consciousness, and less around external reality. Transcendental subjectivity...

Liftschitz swoops in like a great Russian owl, an irruption of natural Kharkovian alterity... beautiful polysemy... Kharkovian heterodoxy right here in this American concert hall...

In piano, like in any language, there is an ethics of communication—one must try always to say what one really means to the other, to understand what the other really means (meant) to say, and to communicate in good faith—with some genuine preparedness to be persuaded by the other. This patience and good will... this receptiveness to endless undecidability... this eschewing of any rule-governed, static response is partly what is so admirable in Lifschitz.

M   ore than any other composer, except some contemporary ones, Bach leads me on these highly exhausting but simultaneously rejoicing quests. Even though I don’t feel particularly content with my Bach playing, for some reason my Bach recordings of the 1990s received some lofty international critical reviews... I am trying to transmit to the listeners a ‘pantheistic’ perception of Earth’s nature with all its hills, brooks, vineyards, fields and seas... I would like to mirror such phenomena as medieval architectonics; frenzy; the immobility of Japanese theatre; and also lyrical urbanity.”
  —  Konstantin Lifschitz.

It amounts to a transcendental ‘undeconstructible condition of deconstruction’, an ‘ultra-ethics’ or ‘meta-ethical ethics of ethics’. The fact that works that we love and think we understood can stand up to being taken apart by this poetic philosopher of the keyboard is... reassuring... breath-taking... unique!


Lifschitz is a responsible imaginer... approachable, not at all elusive. Each work arises within a time and place—it always has a context—Italy in 1640; Germany in 1740; Kharkov in Konstantin’s youth; the world-at-large right now.

One could argue that it is a mistake to read Bach or Frescobaldi in anything other than formal, aesthetic terms. But to do that is to discard the hermeneutics of the work. To reduce them to notes and ritualized performance practice is to refuse to understand them; to hear but refuse to listen. Just as reducing paintings to paint is to ‘see’ but refuse to ‘see as’.

The post-modern Louis le Brocquy studies of the head of Samuel Beckett call into question who is gazing and who is gazed-upon. So, too, the baroque performance style of Konstantin Lifschitz calls seriously into question ‘who’ is playing/saying and ‘who’ is listening. It is truly beautiful in any case—and it is ‘mind-blowing’ as well, if you decide to allow it to be that.

• Konstantin Lifschitz website
  
• Konstantin Lifschitz at Friends of Chamber Music
  
• Lifschitz K. Bach: Musikalisches Opfer; Präludium & Fuge, BWV 552; Frescobaldi: 3 Toccaten. (Orfeo, 2007.)
  
• Strolling through Kharkov
  
• Badura-Skoda P. Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard. Oxford Univ, 1995.
  
• Biddle I, Knight V. Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location. Ashgate, 2007.
  
• Donington R. Baroque Music, Style and Performance. Norton, 1982.
  
• Ede L. Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location. Southern Illinois Univ, 2004.
  
• Fehér M, Kiss O, Ropolyi L, eds. Hermeneutics and Science. Springer, 1999.
  
• Kearney R. Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination. Humanity, 1995.
  
• Troeger R. Playing Bach on the Keyboard. Amadeus, 2003.
  
• Louis le Brocquy page at Wikipedia
  
• le Brocquy website

Chamber Music & Norman Dello Joio

I  n the cool of the night time
The clocks pick off the points
And the mainsprings loosen.
They will need winding
One of these days.
Rabelais, in red boards—
Walt Whitman in green,
Hugo in ten-cent paper covers:
Here they stand on shelves
In the cool of the night time
And there is nothing
To be said against them...”
  —  Carl Sandburg, ‘Cornhuskers’, 1918 (one of the texts/epigrams for Dello Joio’s 1940 ‘Suite for Piano’, premiered at Carnegie Hall on 09-MAR-1941).

The lyricism of Norman Dello Joio, who died last week at age 95 on 24-JUL, is treasured by all who have performed or listened to his works.

In 1939, he received a scholarship to Juilliard, where he studied composition with Bernard Wagenaar. And in 1941 he began studying with Paul Hindemith, who encouraged him to follow his own lyrical inclinations, instead of pursuing atonal or 12-tone systems. By the late 40s, he was highly-regarded among American composers and prolific in a variety of genres, especially choral music. He served on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 40s, and later at Mannes College of Music. He was professor and dean at Boston University until retiring in 1978, when he moved to Long Island. Throughout his career he was devoted to music education, and his ‘Comprehensive Musicianship’ pedagogical materials and advocacy helped to guide and calibrate subsequent generations of authors/composers of curricula, method books and etudes.

Here are some of his chamber music pieces.

• Piano Trio, 1937
  
• Suite for Piano (Sandburg’s Phrases), 1940
  
• Sextet for Three Recorders & String Trio, 1944
  
• Duo Concertato for Cello & Piano, 1945
  
• Sonata No. 1 for Piano, 1947
  
• Sonata No. 2 for Piano, 1948
  
• Sonata No. 3 for Piano, 1948
  
• Trio for Flute, Cello & Piano, 1948
  
• Fantasia on a Gregorian Theme for Violin & Piano, 1949
  
• Variations and Capriccio for Violin & Piano, 1949
  
• Nocturne in E for Piano, 1950
  
• Nocturne in F-sharp for Piano, 1950
  
• Aria and Toccata for Two Pianos, 1955
  
• Colloquies for Violin & Piano, 1964
  
• Bagatelles for Harp, 1969
  
• Capriccio on the Interval of a Second for piano, 1969
  
• Three Essays for Clarinet & Piano, 1974
  
• Lyric Fantasies for Viola and String Quintet, 1975
  
• Sonata for Trumpet and Piano, 1980
  
• Concert Variants for Piano, 1983

[Dello Joio, ‘Trio for Flute, Cello & Piano’, 1948]


Norman’s open harmonies and engaging writing style somehow fit well with the often-weighty subject matter of his compositions. It’s unfortunate that in recent years many of these pieces have not been more frequently performed and recorded. Although not warhorses for sheer technical virtuosic display, they present the performer with challenges of a different sort—conveying depth/complexity of emotion through phrasing and thoughtful gesture. These pieces have great expressive potential, and deserve to be included more often in the chamber music repertoire.





[Dello Joio, ‘Piano Sonata No. 3’, 1948]


Although sight-singing, keyboard harmony, theory, and so on, are part of development of musicianship, Dello Joio’s emphasis and major concern focused on those skills that are mainly cognitive—that is, music concepts and interpretive and analytical skills that are not predominantly developed through psychomotor (performance) drill. By nature he was opposed to performance-practice ‘tricks’, and he was impervious to the seductions of celebrity and technical virtuosity that have attained such popular cachet in recent years. Dello Joio’s traditional artistic values and teaching—and his compositions—are and will remain important guides for us going forward.

N  orman Dello Joio is outstanding for an outgoing directness of expression and simplicity of manner ... which have an intentionally broad appeal. A strong melodic vein; a rhythmic vitality; a relatively restrained harmonic vocabulary; an infectious brio and freshness of invention—these are among the earmarks of his style. Inseparable from this style is Dello Joio’s conviction—resembling almost an ethical attitude—that his music should communicate with a broad, contemporary public——not merely with an alert avant garde, not with a few fellow composers, not with some hypothetical future public.”
  —  Edward Downes, The music of Norman Dello Joio. The Musical Quarterly 1962; 48:149-72.

• Wakin D. Norman Dello Joio, prolific and popular composer, dead at 95. NY Times, 27-JUL-2008.
  
• Norman Dello Joio page at BU
  
• Norman Dello Joio page at Schirmer
  
• Whang U-Y. Analysis of Dello Joio’s Chamber Music for Piano and Strings with Performance Suggestions (PhD Dissertation, Columbia Univ). UMI Ann Arbor, 1986.
  
• Dello Joio N, Beglarian G, eds. Comprehensive Musicianship. Foundation for College Education in Music, Washington, D.C., 1965.
  
• International Society for Music Education (ISME)
  
• College Music Society
  
• National Association for Music Education (U.S.)
  
• VH1 SaveTheMusic program

Enjambing with Kurtág: Lyricism Doesn’t Need Imagery, Only Rhythm

Jakobson once showed how Pushkin’s famous two-stanza poem ‘I Loved You Once’ (Ia vas liubil) depends only on sound rhythms, not on imagery. The same can be true of minimalist chamber music.

It’s possible to make music with practically nothing.”
  —  György Kurtág.

If you’ve not already done so, you may like to look at the DVD Matchstick Man, Judit Kele’s biographical documentary of renowned composer György Kurtág. Among other things, Matchstick Man sheds light on Kurtág’s sessions in 1957 with psychoanalyst Marianne Stein, who led him to explore his creativity by putting matchsticks together. This simple exercise of arranging matchsticks made a strong impression. Kurtág avers that he still knows nothing about composing, but from time to time his muse or alter ego—some mysterious entity who does apparently know things about composing—pinch-hits for him. Empirical composing, using ‘found’ materials, including rhythmic materials such as poems: the epitome of minimalism.


Here in this DVD we have Kurtág as experimentalist, laboratorian, empiricist—here is Kurtág delighted by his ‘found objects’, fascinated by happenstantial relationships among them, passionately engaged by the symbolic connections that they suggest. The film enables us to see and hear how this self-effacing and modest composer creates. What matters to Kurtág is mostly the present, not the past. He rehearses two young players in Schubert’s ‘Arpeggione’ Sonata D.821 in A minor. Ideally, rehearsal is a paradigm in which all participants (the composer, the librettist, the conductor, and the performers) have a ‘say’ in the creative process. But it often doesn’t turn out that way, as this segment of the film suggests.

I understand music really only if I teach it.”
  —  György Kurtág.

In Játékok, Kurtág finds freedom in minimalism. There are interesting enjambments—rhythmic staggerings and offsets between the parts; couplets and tercets; staggered lines. Just as in poetry where the appeal is partly in the visual instability that the enjambments cause for the eye as we scan the page, so too in this music the appeal is partly in the auditory/motivic instability that Kurtág sets in motion. A tercet always feels that it’s pulling toward the missing line, pulling the eye down with urgency to the next thing, to the thing that must happen. Such imbalance seems appropriate to poems about the human condition. Likewise, Kurtág’s instrumental enjambed phrasing feels like pulling, one line for the next, pulling the ear onward with urgency. The rhythmic ‘pull’ and imbalance are central to the beauty of the music. In that regard, these Webern-like miniatures interspersed with folk music-derived pieces and citations of Bach have something in common with rhythmic structure in hip-hop and rap.

Something in common, too, in terms of their aphoristic idiom, if you think about it. By now, the aphoristic song cycle is Kurtág’s signature. He has set a number of the poems of Rimma Dalos, a Russian poet who has lived in Hungary since 1970. Dalos grew up in the Ural mountains and studied German history at Lomonossow University in Moscow. She currently works at the Budapest office of the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. Her works include the a volume of lyric poetry entitled ‘Ohne Dich’ (Without You).

Kurtág’s emphasis on metrical qualities of Russian is much broader than the Rimma Dalos settings, though. He borrows epigrams from a number of Russian poets, including Lermontov and Blok. In the 1970s he became deeply fascinated with Russian literature and took courses in Russian to be able to read Dostoyevsky in the original. His compositions are not all Russian gravitas, however. There is humor in Kurtág’s writing; it is not all confessional and dark and sorrowful. ‘O Love, the Edifier!’ (Omaggio a Luigi Nono, Op. 16) and other pieces are passionate and emphatic and and ironic and full of life. (Just the same, ‘Epilogue’, subtitled ‘A dispirited wail’ and marked ‘Desolato’, and other Kurtág meditations do not contradict their dour markings.)

Omaggio a Luigi Nono (poems in Russian, four of the six being by Rimma Dalos) and Eight Choruses to Poems by Dezső Tandori are comprised of short pieces, most of them less than two minutes long. Songs of Despair and Sorrow are much larger; the longest of the seven is about as long as the entire Omaggio a Luigi Nono, whose six movements take just nine minutes. Songs of Despair and Sorrow is scored for accordion, brass, strings, keyboards and percussion—a 28-member ensemble. This orchestration produces a narrative of alienation and angst that is social or ethnic in scale. By contrast, Omaggio is has a highly personal texture.

Kurtág takes each haiku-like aphorism/poem, assimilates its meter, and creates instrumental enjambments that nicely complement the text. Kurtág’s attention to rhythm is extreme. The first foot of the Lermontov piece that opens Songs of Despair and Sorrow, ‘So Weary’, matches the rhythm of the Russian text very closely. The music has a rise and fall that evokes the idea of world-weariness. The Russian rendering is perfect. It’s hard to imagine this being quite as effective in translation into any other language.

The rolling rhythm, the assonance of it, is one of the built-in features of the Russian language. Technically, assonance is the acoustic mimickry between vowels followed by different consonants in two or more stressed syllables. But here the assonance is architectural for the vocal part and the instrumental parts. The voice is an instrument among equals, and no instrument is sentenced to merely accompany. Kurtág delivers these rhythmic features with crystalline perfection. The stresses are dovetailed between the parts, capturing an important slice of what it means to be Russian.

In other words, these poems—and Kurtág’s setting of them—are perfect icons for the thoughtful use of enjambment, or ‘run-on’ lines. Normally the end of a verse is marked by a syntactic break – the end of a sentence or clause. But with enjambment, the break occurs within the line rather than at the end. In one enjambment in a Dalos poem, the words ‘snow’ and ‘blanket’, linked to form a composite ‘snow-blanket’, are separated by an internal prosodic-syntactic pause. The second line contains a carry-over from the first line, the word ‘pokrova’ (blanket), as well as the first word of a second phrase, ‘came’.

In stanza No. 13, the phrases ‘snow-blanket’ and ‘guest-sorrow’ are structurally parallel, but they also take each other’s metric place in the poem. The enjambment separation of ‘blanket’ from ‘snow’ is deliberate and destabilizing. But blanket-of-snow is a commonplace idiom in a way that juxtaposing ‘guest’ and ‘sorrow’ is not. Dalos doesn’t split them but instead puts them next to each other in the same line. The phrase ‘кo мнe гocтья—тocкa’ (sorrow) is an interesting poetical choice—it easily could’ve been something else: ‘gost’ia-pechal’ (guest-sadness), ‘gost’ia-odinochestvo’ (guest-loneliness), ‘gost’ia-pustota (guest-emptiness). But the rhythm of ‘toska’ is what Dalos selected, and what Kurtág respected.

1.
Пpиди,
 я pyкy пpoтянy.
Teплoм cвoим
 твoй xoлoд пpoгoню.
O, кaк дaвнo
 я в yгoлкax дyши
Xpaню нeнyжныe гpoши.

2.
Oт вcтpeчи
 дo paccтaвaния,
oт пpoщaния
 дo oжидaния
пpoлeг мoй бaбий вeк.

3.
Пpocтитe, милocepдныe,
зa cлaбocть мoю жeнcкyю,
зa тo, чтo пoлюбилa я
дyшoю юpoдивoгo.

4.
Пoзвoль мнe
пpикocнyтьcя к тeбe,
pacплaвитьcя, pacтвopитьcя.

5.
Bce выбиpaлa—
 вce пpoглядeлa.
И дocтaлacь мнe любoвь
 изpяднo пoтpeпaннaя.

6.
Cнитcя oдин и тoт жe coн:
близocти твoeй пpoшy.
Tы пpиближaeшьcя,
я oттaлкивaю тeбя.

7.
Гoвopилa, нeльзя,
гoвopилa, пpoйдeт,
гoвopилa, гoвopилa…
Зa тyмaнoм тex днeй
нe видaть aлыx зopь
зa минyтaми cчacтья—
бoли paзлyки.
Былo cчacтьe y нac,
и paзлyкa былa…
Гoвopилa, нeльзя,
гoвopилa, пpoйдeт,
гoвopилa, гoвopилa…

8.
Пpикpoю дyшy
фигoвым лиcткoм
и yбeгy из paя.

9.
И в пик-чacы
кaтитcя бeз пoмex
тpaмвaй дyши мoeй.

10.
Xoтeлocь явитьcя тeбe
 нeбoжитeльницeй
в cиянии звeзднoгo нимбa,
a пpишлocь oтвopить двepь
 зaмapaшкoю
c вeникoм в гpязнoй pyкe.

11.
Я cнoвa ждy тeбя.
Kaк дoлгo
нe пpиxoдит пocлeзaвтpa.

12.
Boт oпять
вocкpeceньe пpoшлo.
Знaчит, нacтyпит cлeдyющee.

13.
B бeлoм xoлoдe cнeгa—
пoкpoвa пpишлa
 кo мнe гocтья—тocкa.

14.
Умнpeт любoвь,
 зaчaтaя
   в вeceннeй
     cпeшкe.
A y тeбя в caдy
 pacтeт
   тpaвa
     зaбвeнвя.

15.
Oт вcтpeчи
 дo paccтaвaния,
oт пpoщaния
 дo oжидaния
пpoлeг мoй бaбий вeк.

1.
Come,
 here’s my hand:
with my warmth
 I melt your frost.
Too long I’ve kept
 in my soul’s depths—
these useless cents.

2.
From meeting
 to parting,
from leave-taking
 to awaiting
—that was my woman’s lot.

3.
Merciful ones, forgive me
this woman’s weakness,
that I so loved
this holy fool.

4.
Allow me
to touch you;
to melt, to dissolve in you.

5.
Here and there I picked and chose
 till all my chances slipped away
and I was left here with this love so
 ragged and tattered, torn
   and frayed.

6.
Every night, the same dream:
I beg you to come near,
You approach—
I push you away.

7.
I said: it cannot be,
I said: it will pass,
I said, I said…
Beyond the mist of days,
the purple dawn cannot be seen,
nor can the pain of parting
beyond the moment’s bliss.
Bliss we had,
a parting too.
I said: it cannot be,
I said: it will pass,
I said, I said…

8.
I cover my soul
with a fig-leaf
and flee paradise.

9.
Even in the rush-hour
the tramcar of my soul
cheerfully rolls along.

10.
I wanted you to see me
 like some goddess in the glory
of the starry sky:
but then I opened the door
 all ragged, a broom in my
dirty hand.

11.
I’m waiting for you again,
How slowly comes
tomorrow.

12.
That’s another
Sunday over.
That means
The next will come.

13.
In a cold blanket of snow
 a visitor called: sorrow.

14.
The love
 conceived
   amid
     the haste
       of Spring
         is dying.
But in your garden
 grows
   the grass
     of oblivion.

15.
From meeting
 to parting,
from leave-taking
 to awaiting
—that was my woman’s lot.”

  —  poems by Rimma Dalos, music by György Kurtág,

     СЦЕHЫ ИЗ POMAHA:
     15 ПЕ СЕH HA СTИXИ
      РИММЬI ДAЛОШ.

In stanza No. 13, ‘gost’ia’ and ‘toska’ are closely connected through the sibilant ‘s’ sound, which is also present in the first line of the poem—the word ‘cнeгa’ (snega, snow). So we get ‘snow’, ‘guest’, and ‘sorrow’ in one evocative metric group. The metaphor ‘gost’ia-toska’ is beautiful, but if the two words were separated from each other on the page, Dalos would have made the reader wonder. If the cimbalom and violin and double-bass parts were separated from the voice in Canto No. 13, Kurtág would’ve made the listener wonder. So Dalos transmutes words: she pairs ‘blanket’ with ‘snow’ and comingles ‘warmth’ with the image of snow and cold; she uses enjambments to separate two opposites while simultaneously uniting them. And Kurtág’s writing can be regarded as doing the same thing—transmuting meanings; pairing cool phrases with warm ones; juxtaposing a phrase that evokes doubt with a phrase that doubts the very validity and worth of the act of doubting.

Maybe Sofia Gubaidulina’s composition ‘Jetzt immer Schnee’ (a setting of poems by Gennady Aigi) is a close comparable in terms of a felicitous pairing of composer and poet and in terms of a composition’s respecting a poem’s enjambment and other metrical features. These enjambments function like the conduction system in the heart. The heart is under a compulsion to beat, up until the moment we die. Diastole on one line leads to a systole when we begin the next line of the poem, the continuation of the phrase in Kurtág’s music or Gubaidulina’s music. Our understanding and enjoyment of Kurtág’s music—especially these existential and rhythmic qualities of it—are significantly enhanced by this Kele film. Our understanding and enjoyment of Kurtág’s music were also enhanced by Marino Formenti’s exquisite performance last April at the de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, and by studying the scores from Editio Musica Budapest, in which the rhythmic linkages are readily apparent. Beautiful!

T he only political duty ... is a duty to translate the fiction and poetry of other countries so as to make them available to readers in his/her own language. I consider translation a political act because the relations between any two countries are not determined by economic and political interests alone, but also by the degree to which the inhabitants of each are able to understand what the inhabitants of the other are thinking and feeling, and the novelists and poets of this country are the only people who can give one this understanding.”
  —  W.H. Auden, The Plough and the Pen, p. 10.

(Beginning at age 14, Kurtág took piano lessons from Magda Kardos and studied composition with Max Eisikovits at Temesvár. When he was 19 he moved to Budapest in hopes of studying with Bartók at the Franz Liszt Academy, a hope that was preempted by Bartók’s death. Kurtág and György Ligeti became friends during their time together as students in Budapest. At the Budapest Academy, Kurtág studied the piano with Pál Kadosa, composition with Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas, and chamber music with Leó Weiner. Kurtág graduated in piano and chamber music in 1951 (at age 25), and received his graduate degree in composition in 1955 (age 29). In 1957 Kurtág worked in Paris with the Hungarian psychologist Marianne Stein and did coursework with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud. Between 1960 and 1968, he worked as répétiteur for the Hungarian National Philharmonia. In 1967, he became Professor of piano and chamber music at the Budapest Academy. He retired from those positions in 1986. )

W as wissen wir von Rußland und den Russen? Daß die Russen eine »bipolar Mentalität« besitzen, die in sich die widersprüchlichsten Gefühle der »rätselhaften russischen Seele« vereinigt und widerspiegelt, und zwar mit einer Spannweite des Verhaltens, die »von Sanftmut bis zum Zorn, von der Erstarrung bis zum Aktionismus, von der Entsagung bis zum zügellosen Genuß, von der Entwicklung großer Ideen bis zum Phlegma« reicht? Und daß diese Widersprüchlichkeit und Zerrissenheit, die Koexistenz extremer Polaritäten, ein immerwährendes charakteristisches Merkmal der russischen Kultur sind? Dies alles kann man auch heute in verschiedenen westlichen »Reiseführern durch die Labyrinthe der russischen Seele«. Da findet man wieder die beliebigen Stereotypen und Klischees vom ewigen exotischen Russen, eine alte Erfindung des Westens.

[ What do we know of Russia and the Russian? That Russians possess a ‘bipolar mentality’ that unites and is reflected in the contradictory feelings of the ‘mysterious Russian soul’ and expansive behavior, from meekness to wrath, from stiffness to berserking, from self-mortification to unrestrained hedonism, from big ideas to the phlegmatic picayune? Is the coexistence of extreme polarity a fundamental characteristic feature of the Russian culture? One can read this and more in different western guides through the mazes of the ‘Russian Soul’. There one finds again the perennial stereotype and cliché of the eternal exotic Russian, an old invention of the West. ]”
  —  Russische Dichtung.

• Kurtag scores at EMB
  
• Harte T. Game, Set, Stanza: Modern Sport in Russia and the Poetry of OsipMandel'shtam. Russian Review 2000;59:353–70.
  
• Szirtes G. Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza and Pattern. Poetry Magazine, FEB-2006
  
• Duczynka I. The Plough and the Pen: Writings from Hungary, 1930-1956. Owen, 1963.
  
• Jakobson R. Pushkin and His Sculptural Myth. Mouton, 1975.
  
• Jakobson R, Pmorska K, Rudy S, eds. Language in Literature. Belknap, 1990.
  
• Kele J. The Matchstick Man. (Juxtapositions, 2006.)
  
• Kurtag G, Kurtag M. Jatekok. (ECM, 2000.)
  
• Kurtag G, Kurtag M, Csalog G, Kemenes A. Jatekok. (BMC, 2006.)
  
• Lake S, Griffiths P, eds. Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM. Granta, 2007.
  
• McHard J. The Future of Modern Music. Iconic, 2006.
  
• Parker M. String Quartets: A Research and Information Guide. Routledge, 2005.
  
• Scherr B. Russian Poetry: Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme. Univ California Press, 1986, p. 263.
  
• Wachtel M. The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and its Meanings. Cambridge Univ, 1999.
  
• Willson R. Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War. Cambridge Univ, 2007.
  
• willson R. The Mind is a Free Creature. Central Europe Review, 27-MAR-2000.
  
• Marino Formenti plays Kurtag at De Young in SF, 15-APR-2007-1
  
• Marino Formenti plays Kurtag at De Young in SF, 15-APR-2007-3
  
• Marino Formenti plays Kurtag at De Young in SF, 15-APR-2007-4
  
• Marino Formenti plays Kurtag at De Young in SF, 15-APR-2007-5
  
• Marino Formenti plays Kurtag at De Young in SF, 15-APR-2007-6
  
• Marino Formenti plays Kurtag at De Young in SF, 15-APR-2007-2
  
• Marino Formenti website
  
• Arpeggione lute webpage
  
• 15 Songs to Poems by Rimma Dalos (score)

Beam Me Up: Scriabin’s Pleromatic ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’

CMT: Listen to the piano part in Scriabin’s ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’. Isn’t that a pleroma chord, an arpeggiated pleroma chord? [‘Pleroma’—a Gnostic term derived from the Greek word for ‘plenitude’, all-encompassing, located outside the physical universe, not ‘of this world’.]

DSM: That word’s too fancy for its own good. A curious thing about the piano part, though, is how ‘sculptural’ or ‘landscape-like’ it is. The lyrical arcs are delicate, like boughs of a tree bending in a breeze. . . . And the horn part is pondering and re-pondering his situation. Wishing, desiring; then and now. But not just declarative statements—reconsidering, regretful, remorseful, and maybe even recanting as well?


    [30-sec clip, Miller, 1.4MB MP3]

CMT: More Greek for you, then: how about ‘metanoia’? Metanoiesis—not ‘change-of-heart’ in the way that New Testament scholars would have you interpret it, but more like meta-noia as ‘beyond-knowing’ or ‘after-knowing’ or ‘(re-)considering after the fact’ or ‘knowing-about-knowing’ or ‘mind-shifting toward a higher consciousness or transcendent understanding’. In other words, a Greek semiotics not restricted to NT Christian dogma. Isn’t this Scriabin piece about the limits of human understanding and the things that are beyond human understanding? Doesn’t this piece refer to the Divine, to existential unknowns?

DSM: I’ll consider that on my next hearing of the piece. But so far, no. I do hear phrases that could be a ‘change of mind’ in the horn part, a reconsideration as though revisiting an issue in hopes of now understanding it. That’s not a remorseful ‘change-of-heart’ as one who ‘repents’ of wrong-doing would have, in the NT sense. It’s more a revision of an intention or belief, about a topic of existential or metaphysical importance. Not necessarily a movement from a concrete perspective to a transcendent perspective, but instead a change of understanding about the trancendent. Or, maybe it’s an amendment of purpose—of someone who, on the basis of new facts, renounces something he has done or has been doing. The subject of this Romance is reviewing the meaning of a relationship—or the meaning of Life—and making new resolutions, maybe to think differently and undertake new courses of action. ‘Mind’ transcended to ‘Nous’. That’s what I hear. And incidentally I agree with you: I think that NT scholars have misunderstood metanoia far too long. And they keep citing each other, propagating the error, smoking their own dope. If what was intended was semantically equivalent to ‘repentance’, then metamelomai would’ve been used, not metanoia.

CMT: Scriabin took inspiration directly from Vyacheslav Ivanov and other metaphysical poets who were his contemporaries, but he wasn’t an avant-gardist. He was squeamish, introverted, pedantic, obsessive-compulsive, the product of a privileged upbringing—not flamboyant or reckless. And this ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’ was composed in 1890—Scriabin was then 18 years old. Not that much water under his bridge yet. This piece is emphatically not juvenilia. But what does an 18 year old know of transcendence, even a brilliant gifted 18 year old?

S  criabin [was determined] to cease to be an artist, to become instead a prophet, a votary, a predicant. Yet he refused to admit that his design reached beyond Art, that he violated the frontiers of Art and thus ceased to be an artist. On the contrary, he argued that the commonly accepted view of Art was too narrow, its true meaning lost, and its significance obscured. ... To him, Art was the religion of which he was the sacristan.”
  —  Boris de Schloezer, Scriabin: Artist and Mystic. Univ California, 1987, p. 234.

I  t would be a pity if appreciation of the music required us to follow Scriabin into this world of cosmic hocus pocus.”
  —  Hugh Macdonald, Skryabin. Oxford Univ, 1978, p. 10.

N othing is easier than to pour ridicule upon Scriabin’s gradual and finally total self-delusion. Ever since the bubble of his persona was so rudely burst in the 1920s, his quasi-religious convictions have been under relentless fire from the few critics who have paid him any attention at all, and must be eliminated from any possibility of serious consideration, now or in the future.”
  —  Hugh Macdonald, Musical Times 113:22, 1972.

DSM: This piece is encapsulated wonderment through boggling/incomprehensibility. It reveals a world with a fullness completely beyond rational or human emotional cognition.

CMT: Wonderment, maybe. But boggling? I think what we see a glimpse of here is Scriabin’s early ‘ecstatic truth’ / ‘transgressive truth’ vs. ‘compliant truth’ / ‘accountant’s truth’. Explanation of the pleroma chord’s structure only came with scholarly investigation of the octatonic scale, consisting of alternating half-steps and whole-steps, eight notes to the octave instead of 12. The horn has such a large voice! The piano part is ‘sculptural’ in this duet partly because of its timbre relative to the horn.


DSM: Well, besides that, Scriabin’s musical propositions do take the form of bold, unambiguous statements. Lushly lyrical—or, as Taruskin says, ‘ironic’ or even ‘ingenuous’—statements.

CMT: However emphatic or aggressive his writing may be, Scriabin never bewilders. The ‘signaling’ aspect of Scriabin’s compositions—typical of Schnittke and other Russian composers, too—is universally, insistently present. Miller’s gorgeous tone and fine phrasing are well-suited to the challenges of this bold, expansive piece. Beautiful.

T  his semiotic aspect is what makes the music so ‘easily read’—or rather, so easily paraphrased on whatever terms (ethical, spiritual, autobiographical, political) the listener may prefer.”
  —  Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p. 101.

DSM: If Scriabin is through his music expressing the ineffable—the non-paraphrasable—how is it that Taruskin can say this is so ‘easily paraphrased’?

CMT: I think what Taruskin means is that the ineffability expressed by the music can be apprehended on various levels, depending on the receptivity and situation of the listener. I think that the word ‘paraphrase’ is not an apt choice. The moral implications of a passage can be ineffable, but can still be grasped and accurately understood by and localized to the context of a specific listener. The hermeneutics of your understanding of it may be different from mine, say. Taruskin is simply saying that the meanings are multi-valent, pluralistic meanings. It’s not discursive music, like a string quartet. It is inchoate music; it aspires to be a natural phenomenon like the aurora borealis. Deriving the meanings is entirely up to the individual listener. It’s deeply intimate music.

T he result is socialist realism minus socialism. It implies dramaturgy and aspires, beyond that, to the condition of philosophy, even oracle, meanwhile (unlike most oracles) providing built-in ponies . . .”
  —  Richard Taruskin.

DSM: This piece has an unabashed, un-selfconscious immodesty—an ‘I-against-the-world’ aspect to it.

CMT: It has a ‘singing-in-the-shower’ karaoke feel to it—is what you mean to say.

DSM: No, I’m serious. There’s Ivanov’s notion of Scriabin’s vision consisting in surmounting the boundaries of the personal ‘I’—a musical transcendentalism—and a communal mingling of all humanity in a single ‘I’—a macrocosmic universal consciousness.

CMT: It has a certain monumentality, a megalomaniacal quality to it.

DSM: But its spirituality is highly personal and ‘context-dependent’. So experiencing the meanings it contains does require a certain suspension of disbelief, just as you would suspend your disbelief if you were watching a play or a film.

CMT: In other words, you need a bit of incense burning, in order to understand this piece—in order to understand what Scriabin intended!

DSM: If you don’t intend to give the music a chance, fine. That’s your choice.

CMT: But if you give it a chance—if you do suspend your disbelief for a time and project yourself into the piece—then it doesn’t disappoint.

DSM: Scriabin’s ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’ expresses what are, to me, some primitive, animalistic oppositions. It’s hard to imagine that the font of these musical ideas and compositional techniques would have rationally ‘transitioned’ to Scriabin’s later atonality, in the way James Baker suggests in his book.

S  criabin’s art survives because he was a master of the craft of musical composition. Much as he might have been disappointed, it is through the study of his musical structures that we can best know him today.”
  —  James Baker, The Music of Alexander Scriabin, p. 270.

B aker’s] answer has to be regarded, finally, as an evasion, since the phrase ‘we can best know him today’ obviously ought to read ‘I wish to know him.’ It is Baker who has decided that Scriabin can and ought to be assimilated to ‘classical’ culture with its attendant formalism. It is Baker who has decided that autonomous existence may be ascribed to these products of the composer's creative labor.”
  —  Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p. 314.

CMT: So you think Baker was wrong? You think there was no deliberate abandonment of tonality and adoption of atonal compositional methods by Scriabin?

DSM: I’m not asserting that there was ‘none’. I'm only objecting to Baker’s (a) forcing the round peg Scriabin into one of the available square holes and (b) implying that Scriabin deliberately sought to fit into that square-hole category. I think Baker found Scriabin, and doing a simplistic hatchet-job on Scriabin, a very convenient vehicle for his doctoral dissertation and subsequent book. There are few, after all, who would come to Scriabin’s defense. For my taste, Baker was just too simplistic and normative in his analysis, that's all.

A ll conventional music history, whatever the period, is now written in this way; that is precisely what makes it conventional. And in the wake of what is often termed the second wave of modernism—the ‘scientistic’ one that took shape during the Cold War, and in response to it—techno-essentialist values have been a guiding stimulus on musical composition as well.”
  —  Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p. 315.

CMT: Martin Cooper, though, does take time to attend to Scriabin's gestures—Scriabin’s use of motifs that Cooper considers shamanistic zovï (summons) and prigovori (spells).

DSM: And Scriabin’s friend, Belïy, recounted that Scriabin viewed music as superceding poetry. Once Scriabin had composed the music for ‘Poema ekstaza’ he suppressed the words of his poem; he never allowed the words of the poem to be printed in concert programs.

CMT: Is this piece post-romantic? It seems purely ‘romantic’ to me, albeit with more chromaticism than Chopin or others. The horn part is thoroughly ‘tonal’, but the piano is off in space, doing ‘atonal’, bizarrely chromatic things, showing these things to the horn. The horn voice is oblivious, absorbed, ecstatic.

DSM: C.G. Jung said in ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul’ that, in dealing with the psychological mode of artistic creation, we don’t need to ask what the material consists of or what it means. But this question is inevitable in dealing with the visionary mode of creation. The obscurity of the sources of the material in visionary creation is problematic. It’s the opposite of the psychological mode of creation. By ‘psychological mode’ Jung means creation at the level of craftsmanship or manipulation of elements within a pre-defined system—the conscious construction of the work. ‘Visionary creation’ refers to the core of artistic endeavor—what’s expressed and why. It’s clear that Scriabin was a master of both types of creation, regardless how delusional he may have been. Miller evokes a transcendence that is all his own in this Scriabin Romance. So, yes, it’s arguably romantic, not post-romantic. As to whether it’s concordant with Scriabin’s intentions we’ll never know . . .

L  ux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.” (The Light shineth in Darkness, and Darkness has not understood it.)
  —  John 1:5.

CMT: You know, the piano in this piece is not so much an ‘accompaniment’, as it is a musical ‘context’—an enabling, cradling ground within which the horn’s lyricism is made possible.

DSM: I think the key—with this ‘Romance’ and with other of Scriabin’s compositions—is to consider that the composition was devised to cause a change in the listener. It is not an expository statement to be received passively by the listener; it is not attempting to enter into a dialogue with an active listener. Instead, it’s an objet d’art that aims to become a life experience for the listener. And not exactly in the normal present-tense either—instead, what Ivanov called sobïtiye zhizni, somewhat like the German Erlebnis, or the French Déjà vécu or Déjà visité. Beautiful, though, whether we’ve lived it before or not. This entire Greg Miller CD is excellent, don’t you think?

• Greg Miller, horn; Ernest Baretta, piano. Bach to Bernstein. (Musicians’ Showcase, 2003.)
  
• Richard Taruskin page at Univ California Berkeley
  
• Bowers F. New Scriabin: Enigma and Answers. St. Martin's, 1973.
  
• Baker J. The Music of Alexander Scriabin. Yale Univ, 1986.
  
• Damm P, Rosel P. Franzo:sische Musik fu:r Horn und Klavier. (Berlin, 1999.)
  
• Dennett D. The Intentional Stance. MIT, 1989.
  
• de Schloezer B. Scriabin: Artist and Mystic. Univ California, 1987.
  
• Hustis G, Harlos S. Lyrical Gems for Horn. (Crystal, 2002.)
  
• Leland K. Music and the Soul: A Listener's Guide to Achieving Transcendent Musical Experiences. Hampton Roads, 2004.
  
• Macdonald H. Skryabin. Oxford Univ, 1978.
  
• Ruske E, Muzijevic P. Virtuoso Music for Horn & Piano. (Albany, 2001.)
  
• Swan A. Scriabin. Library Reprints, 2001.
  
• Taruskin R. Defining Russia Musically. Princeton Univ, 2001.