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Related Literature Of Gyorgy Kurtag

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2.3 Cluster Concept of Játékok Zongorára
The following discuss the related literature of György Kurtág, his Játékok Zongorára, and the adapted cluster concept into other traditional teaching material.

2.3.1 Biography of György Kurtág
Játékok Zongorára is composed by György Kurtág, one of the most prominent Hungarian avant-garde composer and pianist. Kurtág was born in “Lugoj, Romania in 1926” (Kennedy, Kennedy, & Rutherford-Johnson, 2013, p. 471). He had witnessed the era of World War II (1939-1945), “lived through Hungary’s communist regime (1949-1989)” (Coelho, 2014, p. 1), and currently living in his nineties. He was a “tutor at Bartok’s music school” and Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary during 1958-1963, and a “coach of National …show more content…

Játékok Zongorára is well-known with its distinctive characteristics in terms of pedagogy approach, structure of composition, and the purpose of each movement. The value of play is attached important by Kurtág in this composition series as it involves the use of body as a whole approach to play the piano (Junttu, 2008). In addition, many of the extended piano technique such as “glissandi” and different types of clusters are introduced in a daring way through his pieces in Játékok Zongorára as a “holistic” modern piano pedagogy approach (Loffredo, 2009, p. 8). For the structure of composition, it could be three types in overall: original miniature pieces, original normal pieces, reduction of past pieces from other composers. The idea of homage in writing a music composition and the idea of keeping the impact of traditional notation in the contemporary piano technique are remarkable (Johnson, 2002; Loffredo, 2009)

2.3.3 Three Types of Tone Clusters
According to Barelos (n.d.), the term of “tone clusters” can be defined as “large, dissonant chords” or “can be as small as two adjacent keys played at the same time”. The concept of the tone cluster as one of the extended piano technique was invented by Henry Cowell (Barelos, n.d.; Kase, n.d.; Kase; 2001). It is said that this idea was inspired by a pianist named Leo Ornstein (1892-2002) who was one of the first

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