The lecture was very informative and a good complement to the performances of ‘Mikrokosmos’ in the morning – a rare opportunity to hear a lengthy collection of short pieces all the way through. It was the first time anything like this has been held in the region and a very useful experience for all.
Agustin Fernandez is a lecturer in composition at Newcastle University and a native of Bolivia which meant, he said, that he knew a lot about individuals who were trying to increase a feeling of national identity in a new country. In 1970's Bolivia, Bartok had been held as an example of how to use local folk music to develop national musical identity.
Bartok's nearest 'Hungarian' contemporary was Liszt who was upper class, spoke German and took part in European cultural life rather than that of Hungary. Much of Liszt's music was more cosmopolitan, though his Hungarian Rhapsodies were a useful pointer.
Bartok's early music, for example his Piano Quintet in C minor, sounds like Brahms with his lyrical strings, romantic tonality, dense piano texture, diatonic, and using functional harmony. But at this time Hungary was ceasing to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Bartok felt under immense pressure not to imitate Brahms etc. He began to absorb Liszt's Hungarianisms, especially the Rhapsodies and the popular manifestation of gypsy music, gypsy fiddles, and accelerandi towards the end of pieces. This link between 'gypsy' music and Hungary was then negated deliberately by Bartok - gypsies were after all mainly of a different nationality (Romanian and notwithstanding that Bartok's birth-place is in current Romania!). Bartok went back to local folk music, including Transylvanian folk singing, and found the music starker and more flamboyant.
A few years later he met Kodaly who was already doing ethnological studies. Bartok appealed to the government for money towards collecting folk music and although the appeal was turned down, it had made its mark. Bartok, with his formidable ear, then spent much of his life on folk music research, especially absorbing technique, melody, mode, and rhythm.
At the same time Bartok noted the developments towards atonality by Schoenberg and his disciples. Bartok began to 'import' some into his own music, expressing the opposition between it and his own tonality derived from folk music. As examples Fernandez quoted Bartok's frequent 'night music' using a drone and melody and played an excerpt called "Kati Kata' by Muszikas, a modern popular piece, and then part of the 3rd movement of the fourth String Quartet - a shimmering drone with free-flowing fragments of melody in one or the other instrument. He also played part of the 'Elegy' from the Concerto for Orchestra in similar vein and referred to the 'Night Music' from the 'Out of Doors' Suite in which the 'melodic' part could be based on a bird or an insect. Bartok had absorbed other musics and used them widely, sometimes satirically. Fernandez quoted his satire of the long and banal crescendo of Shostakovich's 7th Symphony in his 'Concerto for Orchestra'. He also borrowed from Bulgarian and Algerian music. For his Bulgarian borrowings Fernandez quoted the complex 7/8 and 5/8 rhythms in his work, again quoting from the Concerto for Orchestra'. But because of his widening use of Bulgarian, Russian and other sources, the right-wing elements of the Hungarian establishment began to call Bartok a traitor to his own nationality.
He referred briefly to some of Bartok's compositional techniques in more technical detail. Bartok used:
· the notion of 'tonal axes' - drawing a diagram showing how Bartok used the 'cycle of fifths' either sequentially or as a counterpole. (The diagram was a clock face with, instead of 12 hour marks, C at 12, G at 1, D at 2, etc; the counterpole is F sharp at 6 so Bartok would alternate music using e.g. the chords of C and then F sharp, or G and C sharp).
· the 'Golden Section' as a compositional technique - a well-used architectural device where you take a unit (of length) and divide it into 2 such that the proportion of the whole to the greater part is the same as the proportion of the lesser part to the greater, in other words 1: 0.618. But time did not permit much explanation on how this was used in Bartok’s music F didn't explain!
· the acoustic scale - a scale which gathers consecutively the first notes of the harmonics of an individual note.
The lecture was very interesting, informative and inspiring, an excellent complement to the performance of 'Mikrokosmos'.
Recommended books on Bartok were:
· 'Bela Bartok - An Analysis of His Music', by Erno Landvai (Stanmore Press 1971) (though he said that some of Landvai’s musicological theories are now discredited);
· Halsey Stevens' Biography (OUP 1953/1964 and most probably still in print).
Andy Summerson 17 February 2006
