![]() There’s no mistaking his music for anything but tonality (with a very few exceptions…), but normal rules of harmony don’t apply here. To an exponential level beyond any before him (and nearly any after), Bartok operates by a different frame of reference. If you spent decades of your life collecting folk music obsessively, you’d have a completely unique musical perspective too. I use this purple prosed metaphor because Bartok’s music sounds as though it comes from the wild, subject to forces so complex no applied science can quantify them.Īgain and again, Bartok went on his rural trips to through the Carpathian Mountains and Basin, recording the music of Hungarians, Slovakians, Romanians, Transylvanians, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Wallachians, going even further afield to record Greeks and Turks and Algerians. And yet, unlike the ancient musical traditions of East Asia, this is truly folk music, a popular music of the people.Īnd it is from this soil of southeastern Europe that Bartok grows these unique sequoias and poplars. Like Indian Classical Music, African Drumming, or Javanese Gamelan Music, this is music with facets so incredibly complex that one has to wonder if any composer in the West ever caught up to it. But Hungarian/Gypsy folk music is folk music as you’ve never heard it – completely out of place with hippies in an American coffeeshop. ![]() To the average American who is not exactly seventy-two, folk music seems like a drudge. On the second night, a rank-and-file violinist in the orchestra named Istvan Kadar, sporting a mustache straight out of the fourteenth century, would approach the front with a violist and a bassist to play folk songs Bartok based a number of his compositions upon in a style ‘as Bartok might have heard them.’ A children’s choir from rural Hungary on the first night, singing antiphonal music that seems like a distant cousin to choral music from France and Flanders in the thirteenth century (only more fun). It was this sort of folk music which we heard in the first half of each concert. Not so Bartok, and if you’d never heard Eastern European folk music, you’d think Bartok invented his own tonality. Stravinsky’s music is full of ‘intentional wrong notes’ and chords, but it usually operates by a harmonic framework Bach would recognize. Bartok reaches back to a prehistory so ancient that we can only speculate its essence, and updates it into a future so distant that we have barely begun to speculate its properties. ![]() He does not, as Stravinsky does, reach back into ancient history and update it for the present. This is the essence of Bartok, simultaneously modern and ancient. ![]()
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