Hungarian composer György Kurtàg was a pianist and professsor of chamber music at the Budapest Academy. In his works one continually confronts the fragmentary nature of memory, the possibility and limits of expression, and the reality of disappearance. One need only note how many of his works are hommages, fragments, ‘splinters’ to understand that there is an unusual wish for the musical elements to succeed at impossibilities. The short pieces of ‘Signs, Games, and Messages’ were all completed separately (many of them revised many times), and form a collection of ‘Games’ which is still growing.