Reference and allusion, present in Kurtag's music from his Op. 1, reflect the discourses of modernism as clearly as the desire to avoid all extra-musical reference in the music of the post-war avant-garde. Kurtag's music is discussed in relation to two sets of ideas: Adorno's concept of musical material, and the “sedimentation” of historical elements within that material; and modernist literature's attempts to represent purely subjective memory, as described in Lukacs' 1957 essay “The Ideology of Modernism”. Kurtag's aesthetic position is closer to that of literary modernism than it is to the modernism of the post-war avantgarde in music. Main reference is made to Kurtag's Op. 28 string quartet Officium breve in memoriam Andreae Szervanszky, in which a network of reference to Kurtag's past is uncovered.