The Sense of the Fragmentary in Kurtág's Several Movements from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Scrapbooks, Op. 37a

• Published in: Music analysis 2022-10, Vol.41 (3), p.440-469
• Main Author: Wu, Yi‐Cheng Daniel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analysis; Chamber music; Vocal music
• ISSN: 0262-5245; 1468-2249
• DOI: 10.1111/musa.12201

ABSTRACT One of the most distinctive developments in György Kurtág's output from the beginning of the 1980s is his setting of incomplete texts. He entitles these songs ‘fragments’, suggesting that they are musical scraps that accompany the extracts from great writers’ works. Kurtág's most representative contribution to this genre is his chamber song cycle Kafka‐Fragments, Op. 24, for soprano and violin (1986). Slightly over a decade later, Kurtág selected 22 aphorisms by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and set them in a new vocal chamber cycle for soprano and double bass as Several Movements from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Scrapbooks (Op. 37a, 1999). To date, most scholars interested in the fragmentary qualities of Kurtág's songs have focused on Op. 24, leaving Op. 37a relatively unexplored. This article corrects this imbalance by providing analyses of three movements from Op. 37a. I approach these songs from the angles of text setting, pitch structure and melodic contour to show how Kurtág utilises these elements to achieve the defining features of ambiguity and incompletion central to the musical fragment.