My Brain Rejects it All, But My Brain Isn’t Worth Much.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, life turns up a hidden gem. Hidden to me at least.

A new reader of mine remarked that one of my posts reminded him of a short New Yorker article called ‘Bach and Belief’. Curious,  I took a look and it led me into the world of  György Kurtág, one of the last surviving composers of the original Avant Garde movement.

Here is the knockout quote from ‘Bach and Belief’ where Kurtag is asked the question, “Are you a believer?”

Kurtág: I do not know. I toy with the idea. Consciously, I am certainly an atheist, but I do not say it out loud, because if I look at Bach, I cannot be an atheist. Then I have to accept the way he believed. His music never stops praying. And how can I get closer if I look at him from the outside? I do not believe in the Gospels in a literal fashion, but a Bach fugue has the Crucifixion in it—as the nails are being driven in. In music, I am always looking for the hammering of the nails…. That is a dual vision. My brain rejects it all. But my brain isn’t worth much.

Wow.

For someone who composed some pretty far out avant garde music –so far out in fact when I was watching this piece

my wife literally begged me to turn it off -I find it interesting he seems to be taken so deeply by Bach. So much so that he feels almost compelled to believe in order to grasp what lies beneath the majesty of his work and leads him to ask how he ‘can get closer if he [only] looks at him from the outside’.

“His music never stops praying”.

Indeed it doesn’t. Bach seemed to worship, to lament, to play in and with and through his music. It’s temporal and fluid but hints at things deep and eternal, painting ultimate contrasts and intriguing paradoxes between carefree playfulness and jarring heaviness of ‘the nails being driven in’.

“My brain rejects it all. But my brain isn’t worth much”

Coming from a man of eighty some years this has got to be some good wisdom.

Kurtag still performs to this day with his wife. Here they are in all their avant garde glory performing the playful and quirky ‘Quarrel’:

And closing with that which appears to haunt him, doubtless even more so as his time here comes to its end and Bach’s piece – “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit” (God’s Time is always the Best Time) forces a reckoning. Truly beautiful.