Dean of the College Presents
Faculty Seminar
Multilingual Soliloquies: The Unaccompanied Voice in the Works of György Kurtág (b. 1926)
Presented by Peter Laki
György Kurtág is one of the most highly regarded composers of our time. Born in 1926 into a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family in Lugoj, Romania (known until 1918 as Lugos, Hungary), Kurtág grew up speaking Hungarian, Romanian, and German. He lived in Hungary from 1945 until the early 1990s, when he moved to Western Europe, eventually settling in southwestern France. He is known, among other things, for his very sophisticated relationship to languages and literatures, having worked with texts by such giants as Hölderlin, Kafka, Beckett, and Akhmatova. Polyglot from an early age, Kurtág has set poetry in Hungarian, German, Russian, English, French, ancient Greek and, recently, Romanian (there is also a short, unpublished Italian fragment of Ungaretti's "M'illumino d'immenso"). Several of these works use a single human voice without any kind of instrumental accompaniment. My presentation will address this rather unusual medium and examine how the entirety of the musical material is generated from the poetic word alone. These works, whose performance can be described as a heightened dramatic recitation, amount to a personal interpretation and a perceptive analysis of the literary sources.
Faculty and staff are invited to join us at 6:30 p.m. for a reception in the Olin Atrium prior to the event.
For more information, call 845-758-7490, or e-mail [email protected].
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102