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Matchsticks, Harmonic Space, and Transpositional Networks in the First Movement of György Kurtág's String Quartet Op. 1

2020; Perspectives of New Music; Volume: 58; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.7757/persnewmusi.58.1.0123

2325-7180

Martins Martins,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

MATCHSTICKS, HARMONIC SPACE, AND TRANSPOSITIONAL NETWORKS IN THE FIRST MOVEMENT OF GYÖRGY KURTÁG'S STRING QUARTET OP. 1 JOSÉ OLIVEIRA MARTINS INTRODUCTION ESPITE ITS BRIEF DURATION, the rst movement of György Kurtág's String Quartet op. 1 has acquired a remarkable symbolic meaning for the composer. The piece was the result of a fervent quest for a distinctive compositional voice and came to embody the qualities of a personal metamorphosis. Written in Budapest in 1959, the string quartet came to represent a recollection of the acute psychological and compositional struggles Kurtág had experienced in Paris the previous years, in which "he was reduced to feeling like a cockroach, surrounded by dirt and putrefaction, while dimly conscious of distant cleanliness and renewal" (Beckles Willson 2004, 47).1 The quartet's compositional treatment established "the fundamental qualities of [Kurtág's] mature work—intensity, directness, and tragedy" (47) and re ected for the rst time the celebrated synthesis of Bartókian and Webernian features often associated with the oeuvre of the composer.2 D 124 Perspectives of New Music The physical and psychological circumstances felt by Kurtág in the Paris studio had crucial implications for the construction of his musical identity. He felt symbolically represented by his degraded environment , including the obsessive play with matches exploring various angular forms. He recalls how these conditions were later channeled into the fabric of the "matchstick composition," along with programmatic allusions in the quartet, particularly the rst movement. In the words of the composer: The year in Paris and the work with Marianne Stein virtually split my life in two. I lost twenty kilos in weight. . . . At rst I repeated some exercises that I had seen my mother do (she had been dead for more than ten years by then), but later on I developed the thing in my own way. I made angular movements, almost like playing a pantomime. I even tried to alter my handwriting to an angular, crabbed style. The next stage of that was my starting to make angular forms from matches. A whole symbolic world evolved. I perceived myself as in a worm-like state, totally diminished in humanity. The matchstick forms and balls of dust (I didn't clean my room every day), along with black stubs (I also smoked) represented me. I gave this matchstick composition [op. 1] the title "The cockroach seeks a way to light" (I stuck a lamp shape from silver foil at the end of the composition). That was also supposed to become the program for the string quartet's rst movement. The overtone chord symbolized the light, and in between the dirt.3 Suggestive of Kurtág's angular matchstick play, the quartet's rst movement unfolds a succession of brief gestures (vertically coordinated across the four instrumental parts), rendering a series of abrupt juxtapositions of contrasting textures, chordal arrangements, and dynamics. The result is a piece of high harmonic and gestural discontinuity where vertical sonorities ("matchsticks") explore a variety of intervallic congurations and registers. Given the resulting "angularity" triggered by the contrasting chord vocabulary, inter-chordal relations in the movement are at once exibly associative while also downplaying the sense of (forward) progression that characterizes temporal linearities.4 The interpretation of the piece's overall harmonic design should then address how juxtapositions of texturally distinct and morphologically contrasting chords might be able to participate in the construction of larger-span formations or lay out principles of harmonic relatedness.5 Interestingly, the various chord formations used Matchsticks, Harmonic Space, and Transpositional Networks 125 in the movement are almost exclusively restricted to interval morphologies that possess the internal properties of pitch and pitch-class (transpositional) recursion and/or (inversional) symmetry.6 The article then explores how the restriction of chord materials and the generative potential of their properties con gure a set of supra-chordal pitch formations, which in turn embed or "inscribe" individual "matchstick chords." The purpose of positing aspects of supra-chordal harmonic coherence for the piece, however, is not so much to mitigate the role of local discontinuities through organic or unitarian pitch-space designs, but rather to clarify how contrasting chord morphologies might also...