György Kurtág (1926 - )
Ligatura-Message to Frances-Marie (The Answered Unanswered Question) Version 1 (1989)
for Cello (played with Frances-Marie Uitti’s double-bow technique), two Violins and Celesta
- [3:43]
Keller Quartett; György Kurtág
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Since the central issue in this piece does consist in a questioning process generating a dialogue, the title ‘answers’, responds to the famous Unanswered Question, the orchestral piece composed by Charles Ives in 1908.
Kurtag’s ploy is quite clearly not an attempt to comprehend the transcendentalist philosophical temper of Ives’s piece: it tends to contemplate the musical expression for a suspended answer - the question may be both answered and unanswered…
We might well be dealing with a question to which there is no thoroughly suitable answer; there is no real answer because, from an ironic and multiple viewpoint, the answer clears out, runs away and ultimately edges away from any conclusive ending up.
In a similar way, Kurtag’s answer will not be satisfying: undermined by this constructive antithesis as it is, the answer can merely reach a certain degree of validity: it can by no means reach out to truth itself; the radical and astounding antinomy inherent in its title is the hallmark of the concomitant prevalence of the answer and the non-answer. The dialogic form is doomed to hesitancy, vacillation, unending open-endedness. Now, does an unanswered question retain its authenticity? Must it renounce its status as a question or on the contrary does it take on a superior quality, which establishes its critical and philosophical validity?
A work of art must ever be in search of the ‘invisible answer,’ in quest of the truth which rules artistic creation. Ceaseless searching, lack of answer condition the existence of a work of art which lives and expands in the open-ended area (of meaning) discovered by the questioning process; and this precedes the answer and ultimately the bestowal of meaning. The ruling principles of Kurtag’s work might be labelled: link, homage, dialogue, memory, recall. The former are immediately perceptible in title and subtitle; the latter crop up in the sound-world of a piece which connects both with Ives’s problematics of the 'musical question’ and with Frances-Marie [Uitti] whose technique influenced Kurtig’s writing. All these items are thus present in Ligatura-Message either on the level of the conditions of its make-up or on the level of its metatextual links. In point of fact, the dialogue is portrayed within the piece where question, answer, silence, doubt, hesitancy are formulated; but outside the piece, the link between the various instrumental exchanges also wants to be a 'ligatura’ between the composer and the instrumentalist. So the interpreter alone can weave the 'ligatura,’ the mere link into a truly meaningful message.
- Tosser, 'Links and ligatures: György Kurtág’s “Ligatura-Message to Frances-Marie” (“The Answered Unanswered Question”)’, Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 2002 [excerpts].
