Bartok, Janacek, Ives

May 29, 2018

Magyar nota

Style hongrois, or ”Gypsy” style

I Haydn, trio no. 39

I Brahms, Hungarian Dance, no. 5

I Liszt, Hungarian Rhapsody

Taruskin on Hungarian Style

...dotted rhythms, syncopations, augmented seconds,distinctive cadence patterns, and so forth. Apart fromthe cadence patterns, perhaps, none of thesecharacteristics were uniquely the property of the stylehongrois. Like most stylistic “signifiers,” it was not asingle trait but a pliable cluster. That gave it greatflexibility: two melodies could be equally obviousexemplifications of the Hungarian cluster withoutnecessarily having any specific traits in common.

Bela Bartok (1881-1945)

I Like Liszt, another Hungarian, begins as a virtuoso pianist.

I Along with Kodaly, begins work transcribing Hungarianfolksong.

I Ends preface to their collected work: “The overwhelmingmajority of Hungarians are not yet Hungarian enough, nolonger naive enough and not yet cultured enough to let thesesongs touch their hearts.”

I Style Hongrois:I “Haughty” rhythms, possibly derived from Hungarian stress

patterns?I Beyond major-minor tonality

Bartok’s dilemma

I Ubiquity and familiarity of style hongrois

I Solution: actually transcribe real peasant folk Hungarianmelodies

I Achieve universal validity through local authenticity

I 1906 publishes, with Kodaly, Magyar nepdalok (“Hungarianfolksongs”)

Bartok on his (inaccurately transcribed) Hungarian folkmelodies

The outcome of these studies was of decisive influenceupon my work, because it liberated me from thetyrannical rule of the major and minor keys . . . . Itbecame clear to me that the old modes, which had beenforgotten in our music, had lost nothing of their vigor.Their new employment made new rhythmic combinationspossible. This new way of using the diatonic scalebrought freedom from the rigid use of the major andminor keys, and eventually led to a new conception of thechromatic scale, every tone of which came to beconsidered of equal value and could be used freely andindependently.

Bartok and tonality and modernity

One point, in particular, I must again stress: our peasantmusic, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in thesense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal.(An ‘atonal’ folk music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.)Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in ourcreative work, it is quite self-evident that our works arequite pronouncedly tonal in type.

I So, a sort of social mission. Modernity connected to socialgrounding

I Lots of pedagogical piano music for kids

I 1909 For Children

Bartok, 14 piano bagatelles, op. 6

I No. 2

I No. 4

I No. 5

I No. 11

I Natural minor

I Symmetry of minor-minor chord

I Symmetry of Dorian mode

Four Dirges, op. 9a

I Four Dirges, no. 2, Andante

I Folk melodies further abstracted (Taruskin: ”utopianized”)

I Many modernistic dissonances, though similar to those ofSchoenberg, are arrived at via a different means.

Taruskin on Bartok’s harmonic palate

This is one simple instance of one of Bartok’s mostpervasive neonationalist techniques: mining his tunes forharmonic symmetries and exploiting them in both thehorizontal and the vertical dimension. The technique ledhim to many of the same harmonies we have seen in the“atonal” (or pantonal) works of Schoenberg and hispupils, but in the case of Bartok it is often possible totrace the novel harmonies back to a specific folk-melodicsource, showing the process to have been less speculativethan empirical.

Taruskin on Harmony in Four Dirges

This is one simple instance of one of Bartok’s mostpervasive neonationalist techniques: mining his tunes forharmonic symmetries and exploiting them in both thehorizontal and the vertical dimension. The technique ledhim to many of the same harmonies we have seen in the“atonal” (or pantonal) works of Schoenberg and hispupils, but in the case of Bartok it is often possible totrace the novel harmonies back to a specific folk-melodicsource, showing the process to have been less speculativethan empirical.

Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta

I Recording

I Complex music theory – “axial symmetry”

I Antokoletz, Elliott. ”Theories of Pitch Organization inBartok’s Music: A Critical Evaluation.” International Journalof Musicology 7 (1998): 259-300.http://www.jstor.org/stable/24620642.

I from full Taruskin

Taruskin on non Tonal Tonality in Bartok

The crucial theoretical point that Bartok’s fugue thusdemonstrates is the way in which the circle of fifths canbe mapped onto the chromatic scale (the “circle ofsemitones”), the only other interval cycle to exhaust allthe pitch classes, so as to traverse the same progressionfrom an axis pitch to its reciprocal. The achievement ofE (Ex. 7-17b), which takes place in both the ascendingand descending “voices” as conceptualized in thediagram, provides the same tangible sense of climax asthe continually foreshadowed but evaded Es had done inthe bagatelle. That sense of climax or completionconditions the same out-and-back tonal trajectory, utterlydifferent yet wholly analogous to the out-and-backtrajectories of tonal music.

Bartok, String Quartet no. 4, mov 1

I Recording

Leos Janacek, 1854 - 1928 I

I Moravian!

I Educated abroad, but still regarded as a ’hick’ (Taruskin) evenin less-than-central Bohemia

I Settles into a long career as music teach in Brno, 1881 foundsBrno Organ School.

I Jenufa, written

If I grow at all, it is only out of folk music, and out ofhuman speech.

I 1903 – Jenufa – violent theme – success

I Gives him the courage of his convictions; Taruskin’s pre- andpost-Jenufa examples

Speech Tunelets

Objectively rendered speech rhythms can be an expression of truehuman subjectivity.Syncopations that arise from the noncoincidence, in Czech, ofstress and length.

I On an Unbroken Path

Katya Kabanova, 1921

I Famously written at a time of intense romantic attachment tomuch younger, unavailable woman

I Katerina, merchant wife, takes a lover, hounded by hermother in law, kills herself in shame.

I Speech tunelets pervade opera, shifting from vocal figures toorchestral ostinati

I Katya Kabanova, finale

Charles Ives, 1874 – 1954

I Undergrad at Yale – music studies with Horatio Parker.

I Didn’t pursue a musical career

I Symphony No. 1 – graduation piece at Yale, 1898

I Symphony No. 2 – composed around the same time, notperformed until 1951!

I From Paracelsus, 1921

Ives’s Dilemma

Yet there was a peculiarly American dimension to Ives’sdilemma after all, because, according to historians of theperiod, it was a dilemma that an American would havefelt then much more acutely than a European. To Feder’spsychoanalytical interpretation we may add that of thesocial historian Frank R. Rossiter, who sees Ives assuccumbing “to enormous pressures that his society andculture brought to bear upon him, pressures that insistedhe be a ‘good American’ in his attitude toward music.”11These powerful pressures had to do with genderidentification and role-playing. In Rossiter’s bluntassessment, the dominant American view during whathistorians now call the Progressive Era (or, lessapprovingly, the “gilded age”) was that “classical musicwas for sissies and women.”12 It was no place for anAmerican man, especially one with Ives’s familybackground.

Ives and Myrick

I Ives becomes rich as an insurance salesman.

I Did he stop being an artist?

I Sexual politics: The Memos, too, abound in raillery against“old ladies of both sexes” who patronized “nice” music.

Sexual Politics

It used to come over me. . . that music had been, and stillwas, too much of an emasculated art. Too much of whatwas easy and usual to play and to hear was calledbeautiful, etc.—the same old even-vibration, Sybariticapron-strings, keeping music too much tied to the oldladies. The string quartet music got more and moreweak, trite, and effeminate. After one of those KneiselQuartet concerts in the old Mendelssohn Hall, I started astring quartet score, half mad, half in fun, and half to tryout, practise, and have some fun with making those menfiddlers get up and do something like men.

Ives, Second String Quartet, mov. 2

Expressive markings in Ives

I String Quartet for four men who converse, discuss, argue (inre ‘politics’), fight, shake hands, shut up, then walk up themountainside to view the firmament.

I Andante emasculata

I Largo sweetota

I alla rubato ELMAN (pretty tone, ladies)

Second Piano Sonata – ”Concord Sonata”

1. Emerson

2. Hawthorne

3. The Alcotts

4. Thoreau

I 45 minutes!

I Assertion of ”true” American music, contra distinguishedEuropean visitors (Dvorak!)

I Relationship to Transendental Philosophy

I Concord Sonata

Gilman’s review of Concord Sonata

Before he was twenty-five, [Ives] had begun thoseaudacious experiments in the organization of sound andthe development of scales and counterpoint and rhythmswhich, for those who have studied their outcome in hislater works, make the typical utterances of Schonbergsound like Haydn sonatas. And we are to bear in mindthat when Ives was evolving this incredibleultra-modernism of the American nineties, Schonberg,then in his early twenties, had not yet ventured evenupon the adolescent Wagnerism of his ‘Verklarte Nacht’;and the youthful Stravinsky was playing marbles inOranienbaum.