Ah! The children of the night! What beautiful music they make! [Spoken in my scariest Bela Lugosi voice.]
Oh, does that scare you too much? Imagine Gary Oldman's voice, then.
Sadly for any vampire lovers, this diary won't be about Dracula, but about Bela Bartok, who just happens to be the greatest musician to ever come out of Transylvania. Well, the greatest musician who didn't wear women's high heels.
I have my job set out for me this week. Last week, Debussy -- such a cakewalk! But Bartok... his music is the most advanced and difficult that we've covered in a diary to date, and I won't blame anybody reading today if they throw up their hands in despair. Much of Bartok's music is difficult to penetrate. Despite that, though, I think I can make this easy and fun.
But why bother? So we can finish covering the twentieth century and say we tried our best? Well, no. I could have chosen any of a number of other representative composers to round out our survey of the twentieth century, but Bartok is special because Bartok is GOOD. The twentieth century was rife with composers ready to spew out dissonant drivel more notable for being boldly experimental than for what it communicated. Bartok's music, though, had a voice.
Bartok was not a bold avant-garde experimenter. He was eclectic, freely absorbing the modernist techniques of other vanguard artists of his time, like Stravinsky and Schoenberg, but he used these influences with his own style. Accordingly, that style changed quite a bit over the years, choosing a single representative work of Bartok's is a difficult task.
For instance, there is this, a very beautiful piece, Two Portraits: One Perfect One Grotesque (we hear here the first one, Perfect), which is characteristic of his early twenties period.
This is music more influenced by Debussy and Stravinsky than his later folk music hybrid style. Like Debussy, who he acknowledged, the style here is somewhat nebulous, tonal but vague about it's center. For all that, difficult as it may be at times, though, it's beautiful, almost romantic, more consonant than dissonant.
... But, I did mention folk music influences, didn't I? Bartok's later music, like the Romanian Stamp Dance at the top, was influenced by folk music. REAL eastern European folk music, not the fake stuff. In 1906, Bartok and a friend, the young composer Kodaly, laid hands on one of the early Edison wax recording devices and set out for the more remote village regions of eastern Europe to record, preserve, and study the indigenous music of villagers. It was a task that took up much of his time until World War II, when he escaped to America with his family. His research in ethnic music, published in books and essays, served as the foundation of the then-budding science of ethnomusicology. Rather than sanitizing the music for your protection in pop fashion the way Liszt had done with his Hungarian Rhapsodies fifty years earlier, Bartok was proud to present village music in its unpolished form, with its unusual broken rhythms and scales and harmonies that violated traditional western rules of music.
How raw, how broken? With a little googlin' around, I found a Youtube clip of Hungarian Magyar folk music (a wedding dance, I believe), not recorded by Bartok, but representative of the kind of music that he and Kodaly would have recorded.
When I listen to the above, my first inclination is to filter out those sounds that sound out of place, like the dissonances and the quarter tones in conflicting rhythms, as if they are just sloppiness of people who not well-trained at their instruments. Bartok and Kodaly, however, took these things at face value as a vital and intentional part of the folk music style.
We can hear this kind of folk music's influence on Bartok's compositions in works like this, the Dance in Bulgarian Rhythm #6 from Mikrokosmos, performed by the Ed Pessoa jazz trio.
Did I say jazz trio? Originally, this was a solo piano piece from Mikrokosmos. My brother, who hates classical music (and especially hates Bartok, oh, don't get him started) had to study piano in college using Bartok's Mikrokosmos series. Mikrokosmos is a very popular piano training book at the college level. Bartok originally began the series, which consists of more than a hundred piano pieces graded from very easy to very hard, to teach his young son to play the piano.
As one might expect from music that was designed for teaching piano, Youtube is full of amateur examples from Mikrokosmos, like this one, Ostinato (Mikrokosmos lesson #146), played by a very young boy.
And, by the way, as a general note on good manners and the wholeness of the universe, may I suggest, when I post Youtubes of amateurs, it might be good for one's karma in the next life if you click through to the Youtube site and give the little guy a "Like" click.
Ostinato is a bit more typical of Bartok's mature style. It has a certain frantic, violent edge to it.
I'm going to skip ahead to some of the good stuff, now: Bartok String Quartet #4, perhaps my single favorite piece of twentieth century modern music. (Although now that the twentieth century is over, it seems silly to keep calling it modernist, doesn't it?) This is exemplary of that same edginess. The final movement of the Bartok String Quartet #4, performed by the Zehetmar Quartet.
I've posted this, the final movement, in comments many times before. It still amazes me. The first time I heard it, a gazillion years ago, it was on a mono recording that I borrowed from the school library, and I remember being shocked by the intensity of it. At the time, I was trying to challenge myself with more modern composers like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. I soon lost interest in the others and began to immerse myself in Bartok. It's not just that the music of this quartet is powerful and affecting from the first listen: it's that on subsequent hearings, you start to put it all together. It is as organized as any Beethoven quartet, with recurring motifs developed and shared between movements and a first movement in good ol' sonata-allegro form, albeit this quartet is in a wholly different musical language. Even here, we can hear the Bartok folk music influence, but he has gone way beyond that in terms of the musical influences he has incorporated. But one Youtube commenter described the above piece as "Bartok hard-rocking!"
I'm incapable of analyzing Bartok correctly for you. On the one hand, it's sad that I'm not wholly adequate to the task, and yet it may be a blessing in other regards because I'm forced to dumb down my explanations. I can explain different styles of his and group pieces together that way, I can tell you about his influences, whose music he admired, but when it gets to the music theory behind Bartok's music, I'm getting way out of my league. I know enough music theory to fake my way through most of this diary series without incident, but Bartok's musical vocabulary in his middle period isn't something easily explainable. For instance, try this explanation, from Wikipedia's entry on Bartok:
Although Bartók claimed in his writings that his music is always tonal, it rarely uses the chords or scales of tonality, and so the descriptive resources of tonal theory are of limited use. George Perle and Elliott Antokoletz focus on alternative methods of signaling tonal centers, via axes of inversional symmetry. Others view Bartok's axes of symmetry in terms of atonal analytic protocols. Richard Cohn argues that inversional symmetry is often a byproduct of another atonal procedure, the formation of chords from transpositionally related dyads. Atonal pitch-class theory also furnishes the resources for exploring polymodal chromaticism, projected sets, privileged patterns, and large set types used as source sets such as the equal tempered twelve tone aggregate, octatonic scale (and alpha chord), the diatonic and heptatonia seconda seven-note scales, and less often the whole tone scale and the primary pentatonic collection (Wilson 1992, 24–29).
You can spend weeks clicking through all the linked words on that paragraph, and all the links that those links have, etc., etc. Let me focus on the first sentence though: "Although Bartok claimed in his writings that his music is always tonal..." Claimed? Like it's not a factual true/false matter, like the music isn't there to be listened to? In fact, you can listen to Bartok's more abstract music, like the Quartet #4, above, and you can identify chords and home keys, but sometimes it's just hard to pick them out, even if you put a guitar in your lap, like me, and identify little fragments of it to see where it's going.
But true to Bartok's word, he is not atonal. Next week (or next diary), we will introduce real atonal music, and though it may be difficult at times to tell from some of Bartok's music, there is a big difference in structure and intent. Atonal music doesn't just give up trying to be tonal -- it has to work hard to stay atonal, something Schoenberg quickly discovered. The ears of we, the modern music listeners, are so stubbornly programmed to listen for tonal queues in music that we find them even when the composer doesn't intend them. Bartok eschewed all that, bless his little Transylvanian heart.
I want to play one more movement from the String Quartet #4, the third movement (Lento non Troppo). Very different from the finale movement we previously heard.
What a different tone! Where the finale movement is bristling with fire and anger, this one is peaceful, but it's an otherworldly peacefulness. The three higher strings play soft chords (in what we call quartal harmony, if we get technical), soft and translucent, when in comes the cello (0:24), whispering a lonely song atop it (based on Magyar-style folk music, if we are to believe liner notes). After brief intervals, it returns to sing the same melody two more times, each time with more passion, even anguish. At 2:33, a birdlike (and probably intentionally birdlike) twittering sound is heard from a violin, before it takes over and sings the cello's song. At 3:56, the cello returns to join the violin, but now its song is changed, more upbeat, and it sings together with the violin. Finally, the violin softly bird-twitters us out of the movement, fading away.
As sophisticated as the techniques used may be, the structure of the movement itself is crystal clear, and the emotions break through to us, making it tangible.
I'll tell you a little about myself and this piece. Back in 1983, I made a recording of this Lento movement for my own amusement. I loved it so much that I copied the written music score at thel library and patiently programmed the score into my Apple II computer over the course of at least a week, note by note. Compared to some of my other computer-music experiments, it turned out not too badly because the weirdness of the music made up for the lack of human intonation you could expect. (Barber's Adagio, by comparison, was ghastly when done this way!)
Bartok's music in this middle period was eerie. You may already be familiar with some of Bartok's music from horror films, like The Shining. Here is the Adagio from his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, used in the Shining.
Note that some of the eeriness of the piece comes from, again, the use of inter-weaved folk-style melodies, but in a modern way, with dissonant harmonies. And, oh man, the mixture of celesta with violin slides at 2:30 is creepy!
For more mature period Bartok creepiness, there's also the third movement from his Concerto for Orchestra, probably Bartok's most famous and most-performed orchestral work. If you heard Bartok for the first time in college, it was probably through this work:
Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, third movement Elegia, performed by Zubin Mehta and the L.A. Philharmonic
And while we're still on the topic of eeriness, did I mention Dracula in the intro at the top? Did I mention Gary Oldman? Francis Ford Coppola's version of the film, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) (which was nothing like Stoker's novel, by the way) had an original music score by film composer Wojciech Kilar. Listen to it here for the Bartok influence.
Ah, the children of the night! Now, personally, if I were going to have to work all day impaling Turks, I would prefer the String Quartet #4 finale, but this will do, romanticized and Hollywood-ized as it may be. If you skip forward to the 5:08 point, you can hear the eerie modal cello theme, another act of Bartok mimicry, this too romanticized.
This eeriness in some of Bartok's music has its own name and its own entry in Wikipedia, Bartok's "Night Music Style."
Night Music is a musical style of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók which he used mostly in slow movements of multi-movement ensemble or orchestra compositions in his mature period. It is characterized by "eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies[1]."
Perhaps most eponymously characteristic of this is "The Night's Music" section of Bartok's Out of Doors piano suite. I'd kill myself before I would do a diary about Bartok without including this piece.
Bartok's Out of Doors Suite, fourth movement, The Night's Music, performed by Maurizio Pollini
There are actually two movements in this clip, the fourth and the final fifth movement at the end. Of The Night's Music, Wikipedia has this to say:
... For instance, a pastoral flute and its melody are portrayed in The Night’s Music from Out of Doors. The effect on the listener is not primarily the esthetic effect of the melody. The melody's effect is rather indirect: the evocation of being out of doors at night in the plain and hearing the shepherd play his melody[6]. In the words of Milan Kundera, not only the natural sounds at night, but also the lonely songs and melodies, far from being a Lied or other self-expression of the composer, find their origin in the external world[7]. In the words of Schneider "Bartók seems to be suggesting musically the old Romantic organicist idea that peasant [and shepherds'] music is a natural phenomenon, a view he expressed in writing on several occasions".
The Out of Doors suite has a reputation for being perhaps the most difficult to perform Bartok piano piece. Given that, Bartok's instructions to the performer to improvise (!) could be enough to drive some performers crazy. From another Wikipedia entry, a gem:
The random scoring of nature's sounds in the A-material makes memorisation extremely difficult. But memorisation turns out to be not necessary as witnessed by the anecdote of Mária Comensoli, a piano student of Bartók. She was astonished when she first played The Night's Music by heart (as required at Bartók's lessons) and Bartók remarked:
"Are you playing exactly the same number of ornaments that imitate the noises of the night and at exactly the same place where I indicated them? This does not have to be taken so seriously, you can place them anywhere and play of them as many as you like."[24]
That makes it tempting to collect different performances and compare them, doesn't it?
Next week [UPDATED]: It's confirmed. ProudToBeLiberal will be here, next Thursday 3/10 with a diary on the music of Alan Hovahness. Our tag for the series is CMOPUS, so you know how to find it. I'll be back on Thursday 3/17 with a diary about Arnold Schoenberg and atonal music. Fun, fun, fun!