There’s nothing new about mining Balkan states for musical inspiration. Combing his way through the Balkan states and getting as far east as Turkey, the classical composer Béla Bartók found his verve recording folk melodies in rural regions. With an output that is richly recorded on a number of LPs, the music his research compelled him to make has rightly earned him a place among the great classical composers of all time.
When the twenty-four year old Béla Bartók set out towards the villages of his native Hungary, he didn’t pack light. Instead of taking a well-worn Lonely Planet with him as he backpacked his way through Eastern Europe he carried along a recording gramophone. In what was probably a little like bringing ice to the village of Macondo, being as it was 1905, it further perplexed the villagers when he asked them to step up and sing into the horn of the gramophone.
The impetus for this grand tour came from the composer Zoltán Kodály who was a colleague of Bartók’s at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. On Kodály’s insistence, the younger man travelled the peasant regions of what are now Hungary, Romania, Slovakia as well as Serbia and Bulgaria for over a decade. He even made it as far as the Middle East cataloguing a number of Turkish and Arab folk melodies. Altogether he collected over 9000 songs, most of which were Romanian and Slovak, which he then transcribed into classical notation and are now made available by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute for Musicology.
The Tone Collector: Bartók, fourth from the left, recording the folk songs of peasants.
But if that was Bartók the collector, what about Bartók the composer? For one, he had a hunch that his research would lead him to music that would not only give classical music a different perspective but transform its nature entirely. His predecessors had already had a crack at using folk melodies in their music. Chopin had wildly popularised Polish mazurkas and polonaises, and Brahms had already written a number of Hungarian waltzes and dances that were instantly recognisable. Dvořák had his Slavonic Dances which touched on themes in Czech folk music. Even Bartók’s fellow Hungarian Franz Liszt immortalised Hungarian tunes to the wider public and anyone who watched Tom and Jerry. Yet as epic as these works were, for Bartók at least, they only addressed folk music at surface value; a patronising effect analogous with dressing a peasant in a tuxedo.
The young composer didn’t intend to simply pay lip-service to the music he found. In his research he found songs that examined the innermost voices of mankind – from songs of marriage and religious hymns to elegiac or even humorous songs of death – describing the light and the darkness of human life, and he wished to give voice to these themes by addressing the music’s underlying structure.
One major structural difference Bartók encountered was how folk music in the region obeyed the pentatonic scale (where there are only 5 notes in the scale) rather than the usual heptatonic scale (which has 7 notes and the eighth completes the octave). The ideas weren’t wholly novel as Bartók drew inspiration from the French composer Claude Debussy, who had already experimented in the use of the pentatonic scale and Eastern ideas in classical music. But the resulting music was a revelation and startlingly original.
This isn’t to say that it was well-received on debut. His Piano Concerto No. 1 for example was harsh, dissonant and, by the composer’s own admission, monstrously difficult for the orchestra to make sense of. Eugene Hütz, the lead singer from the gypsy punk outfit Gogol Bordello (they used to be called Hütz and the Béla Bartóks) recently said of Bartók’s music:
[Bartók] eventually kind of freaked out and made his own musical world…It was a kind of ethno-avant-garde music and in a lot of ways helped me to think how to really work with that goldmine.
One of the better examples of Bartók “freaking out” would be The Miraculous Mandarin; music set to a pantomime about a group of thugs using a prostitute to lure in victims one by one. The work was a social satire on post-World War I Hungary and was censured by the authorities on its public release in 1928 for its obscene content.
The Miraculous Mandarin Op. 19, Sz. 73
Obscenities aside, it was a challenging work for the listener too. Fortunately for Bartók, his innovation could not have come at a better time. Arnold Schönberg and the Second Viennese School had already exhibited their atonal works and were growing in acceptance. Bartók appreciated their work but believed that true musical novelty could also come from emulating more primitive melodies (particularly his travels around the Carpathian Basin in the late 20s) without resorting to atonality or simply being reactionary. “The difference” Bartók once wrote distancing himself from Schönberg’s ideas, “was that we created through Nature.”
That ‘nature’, which Bartók strove to understand so tirelessly, was that of the primacy of dance and percussion within music. This can be seen in the variety of tones of his Romanian Folk Dances which is perhaps his most played if not sampled work. The record label Hungaroton Records (a label resurrected in the late 90s that specialises in gypsy, classical and other music from the region) also released a helpful comparison of folk melodies and the compositions they inspired. Of course, the element of dance that he sought to bring into classical music had its limitations. After all, we are talking about a genre of sitting still and applauding politely. Still, through the use of drums and winding contrapuntal melodies he infused his music with the gypsy beats of the East.
Two good examples are the 25 minute Divertimento for String Orchestra (which he finished composing in just two weeks in a Swiss chalet) and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta which is an unsettling dark work that Stanley Kubrick used as background music in The Shining. The Divertimento is not meant as dance music but its early and last movements are clearly driven by the rhythmic melodies. In Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, it’s only in the second movement that the drums kick in. However, as in Balkan folk music, the strings are what drive the percussion during the entire work.
Divertimento for String Orchestra
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Sz. 106, BB 114
Both of these recordings were made with one of Bartók’s pupils Ferenc Fricsay and if there is one record of Bartók’s music worth owning, it’s one where Fricsay’s involved. The native Hungarian understood his teacher like few others and made a wealth of recordings of Bartók’s works sold under the banner of Deutsche Grammophon. Another student of his, the pianist György Sándor along with fellow Hungarian Géza Anda popularised Bartók’s piano compositions and are must have LP’s for a Bartók lover. As a result of these extraordinary performances, many of Bartók’s works are seen as part of the standard repertoire of the great orchestras; the Concerto for Orchestra, his Violin Concerto No. 2 as well as his Piano Concerto No. 2 are now part of a modern orchestra’s staple diet.
Violin Concerto No. 2, Sz. 112, BB 117
After the outbreak of war in Europe, Bartók did what any musician with a hefty collection of records would; he moved to the Bronx. In New York he continued to receive commissions for new compositions and the last 5 years he spent there proved to be highly productive; having produced the highly-regarded Concerto for Orchestra and his final piano concerto. His Piano Concerto No. 3 remained unfinished and was completed by his close friend, the conductor Tibor Serly, on Bartók’s death at the age of 65. The second movement is a deeply moving section and it’s tempting to see Bartók’s use of a sparse, minimalist arrangement as a reflection on his own mortality.
Piano Concerto No. 3, Sz. 119, BB 127
Within 70 years of his death the New York Times listed Bartók as one of the top 10 composers of all time (the remaining composers being Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, Brahms, Verdi, Wagner and Stravinsky). For a man humble in his achievements and dwarfed by the celebrity of peers like Stravinsky, it’s unlikely he would have imagined himself on such an illustrious list when he set off all those years before with a gramophone recorder into the rural regions of Hungary and Romania.
Illustration by Sheila Seyfert-Menzel.
