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NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By Joseph
Horowitz
Artistic
Advisor to the Takacs/Muzsikas collaboration
Western
classical music has frequently drawn inspiration from folk and
vernacular music. But for few composers did the music and dance of
peasants figure as decisively as for Bela Bartok. Bartok was in
fact a leading ethnomusicologist who spent a good part of his
professional life collecting and analyzing peasant tunes. During
his most intensive period of field research, before 1920, he
transcribed nearly 10,000 of them. He once called this work "the
happiest part of my life." The studios of famous musicians
have typically displayed pictures and busts of other important
musicians. Bartok's workplace typically contained a single
portrait of Beethoven amid peasant embroideries, pottery,
instruments, and furnishings -- including a Transylvanian table
upon which was were carved the words "Bela Bartok."
Previous
to the field research of Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, "Hungarian"
music had referred to what gypsy bands played in restaurants and
cafes. The well-known Hungarian Dances of Brahms employ actual
gypsy tunes; Haydn, Weber, Schubert, and Liszt were similarly
influenced by what musicologists today term the style hongrois. In
comparison, the rural music Bartok and Kodaly recorded at the
source, tangy and untamed, had never reached Budapest or Vienna.
Bartok wrote: "In the so-called cultured urban circles, the
unbelievably rich treasure of folk music was entirely unknown. No
one even suspected that this kind of music existed." And
also: "It lives untrammeled among the people themselves. If
he allows himself to surrender to the impressions of living folk
music, and if he can mirror the effect of these impressions in his
works, then [the composer] has recorded a piece of life."
Bartok
not only insisted on the significance of peasant music; he
insisted that it be experienced at first hand. "It was of the
utmost consequence to us that we had to do our collecting
ourselves, and did not make the acquaintance of our melodic
material in written or printed collections. The melodies of a
written or printed collection are in essence dead materials. . . .
one absolutely cannot penetrate into the real, throbbing life of
this music by means of them. In order to really feel the vitality
of this music, one must, so to speak, have lived it - and this is
only possible when one comes to know it through direct contact
with the peasants."
The
present program presents a rare opportunity to hear what Bartok
heard - both as recorded by Bartok himself on primitive
phonographs and as recreated by the contemporary Hungarian folk
ensemble Muzsikas. The Muzsikas musicians, an outgrowth of
Hungary's "Dance House" movement of the 1970s, have
themselves researched and collected in remote regions of Hungary.
With their folk string, percussion, and wind instruments, and with
the participation of the singer Marta Sebestyen, they offer music
as different from café strains as Bartok's dances and
rhapsodies are different from those of Brahms and Liszt.
In
a famous 1931 essay, Bartok defined various degrees of folksong
appropriation, beginning with the simple practice of adding an
accompaniment, a prelude and a postlude - as in the folksong
arrangements for voice and piano that he and Kodaly created. How
close are, say, the well-known Bartok Rumanian Folk Dances (1915)
to their sources? To hear Muzsikas's Peter Eri play "Pe loc"
on a wooden flute - a rendition based not on Bartok's composed "Pe
loc" but on the original tune as Bartok collected it in the
village of Irgis in 1912 -- may or may not suggest an answer. The
"mumbling" style of performance - Eri blows and sings at
the same time - creates an earthy, buzzing resonance no piano
could simulate. Bartok's original piano version faithfully follows
the tune. But (unlike Muzsikas) he adds an atmospheric bagpipe
drone - a simple chordal accompaniment smeared by the sustaining
pedal. In the string transcription we hear the Takacs Quartet
play, double stops in the cello recreate the bagpipe effect.
Muzsikas's
version of the first Rumanian Dance, the stick dance "Joc cu
bata," is based on a 1912 Bartok field recording. Bartok's
composed version is less stylized, more specific: the pulsating
accompaniment acquires relative harmonic sophistication; the tune
is invested with details of articulation and dynamics. (Bartok's
own performance of this dance, as recorded around 1920,
interpolates ornaments not to be found in his composed version -
but played by Muzsikas. In all six Rumanian Dances, Bartok's piano
style - if the piano roll can be trusted - is notable for such
"peasant " traits as firm rhythm, loud accompaniments,
and the absence of all sentimentality and prettiness. More
revealing of Bartok the pianist, and again suggesting folk
influence, is a live 1940 performance of Beethoven's Kreutzer
Sonata with Joseph Szigeti - the earthiest, most explosive
rendition of this music I have ever encountered, bristling with
raw feeling and - from the magnificent violinist - raw tone.)
At
the furthest remove from the Rumanian Folk Dances is the Fourth
String Quartet of 1928 - a famous instance of Bartok the high
modernist. What kind of relationship may be drawn between this
singular chamber music, which virtually abandons traditional
tonality, and the peasant strains Bartok adored? There is no
simple answer (nothing about Bartok is simple).
Attempting
a closer look: Bartok's admiration for peasant life did not
preclude idealization. He began his ethnological investigations as
a Romantic nationalist who despised urban "frivolity"
and modern-day capitalism. He hated the noises of the city. He
admired individual peasants for their organic relationship to
nature, feeling, and expression. But his prolonged exposure to
actual peasant life, while vicarious, was often dank and muddy.
His letters abound in complaints about foul weather, bad food, and
unfriendly villagers (he at least once felt the need to arm
himself with a knife). However, he also wrote (in Karcfalva, in
1907): "I feel so strange here . . . I come and go with
frequent excitement. . . . If I wanted to analyze this feeling, I
might even claim it was happiness." Hungarian scholars
have analyzed this "happiness." A strangely withdrawn
and fastidious man, Bartok was in no way a candidate to
participate in a communal rural lifestyle. In the remote
countryside he rather experienced an act of detachment, of
withdrawal into himself in concert with nature. He typically
traveled with cigar boxes filled with insects which he
scrupulously and compulsively collected. He could study a beetle
for an hour. The impressions thus absorbed - of people and
customs, worms and moths - signified for Bartok "reality"
and "truth." He pertinently wrote, in 1909 from
Slovakia:
It
is strange that in music the basis of motivation has so far been
only enthusiasm, love, sorrow, or, at most, despair - that is,
only the so-called lofty feelings. It is only in our times that
there is place for the painting of the feeling of vengeance, the
grotesque, and the sarcastic. For this reason the music of today
could be called realist because, unlike the idealism of the
previous eras, it extends with honesty to all real human emotions
without excluding any.
"Real
human emotions" were emotions unrefined by city norms.
Stylistically, too, peasant music was something true and pure: "It
is impulsively created by a community of men who have had no
schooling; it is as much a natural product as are the various
forms of animal and vegetable life." As sound, as feeling,
peasant music (like the performances of Muzsikas; unlike the
"Hungarian music" more slickly purveyed by gypsy
entertainers) was for better or worse unvarnished: never
sentimental, never rhetorically inflated.
If
these are mainly subjective impressions, the objective materials
of folk music were, for Bartok, at least absorbing. Though he
cherished the "spirit" of folk performers, he also
confessed that the melodies could grow tiresome. His interest was
"scientific." He categorized modes and rhythms. He
studied and adapted unconscious techniques of construction -- in
particular, techniques of variation. Bartok's aversion to literal
repetition and sequential progression correlates with the
spontaneous transformations of music improvised in performance.
These
remarks furnish one listening context for the Fourth Quartet. In
place of "lofty feelings," a savage intensity invades
the concert room. The four instruments emit high-pitched screeches
and grotesque, swooping slides. Some sounds - the dense, dissonant
multiple stops; the "snapped pizzicato" of the fourth
movement, in which the string rebounds against the fingerboard -
distinctly evoke the harsh twang and intonation of peasant
fiddling. In the slow third movment - the eye of the storm - the
cello eloquently sings something like a peasant song (in our
performance, Muzsikas suggestively prefaces this music with a
"Peacock" melody from ???[DANI]). Here the selective
vibrato of the drone accompaniment - Bartok asks for an
alternation of "non-vibrato" and "vibrato"
pianissimo chords - is another folk feature [DANI: do you agree?].
The "insect sounds" that intervene midway through are a
typical example of Bartokian "night music" - a spectral
genre, original to this composer, inspired by companionship with
nature. The nervous twitter and whir of the eerie second movement
is a more abstract variant of the same aural sensation. Other folk
connections are less obvious. The scholarly literature informs us
that the raucous motoric rhythm of the finale derives from a
Bulgarian dance. In the first movement, Bartok's tight
interweaving - like a village quiltmaker? -- of two- and
three-note motivic cells may correlate with his admiration of
peasant music as "the classical model of how to express an
idea musically in the most concise form, with the greatest
simplicity of means, with freshness and life, briefly yet
completely and properly proportioned."
The
tense, cramped compactness of this opening music is one premise of
the work; the contemplative slow movement, amid nature's
stillness, loosens the discourse; the wildly throbbing finale,
with its longer, more diatonic lines, is an unbuttoned variant of
movement one ending with the same six-note exclamation: a physical
release. Bartok himself furnished this useful blueprint:
The
work is in five movements . . . The slow movement is the kernel of
the work; the other movements are, as it were, arranged in layers
around it. Movement four is a free variation of two, and one and
five have the same thematic material; that is, around the kernel,
metaphorically speaking, one and five are the outer, two and four
the inner layers.
The
miracle of this music, of "middle Bartok" generally, is
the interpenetration of peasant and city, instinct and logic, the
visceral and cerebral. Its folk roots never seem denatured by
urban sophistications; its intellectual poise never seems violated
by rustic energies.
Our
program also features, with attendant folk sources, three of
Bartok's 44? Duos for two violins, the well-known "Bear
Dance" (from [DANI: what Bartok work?]) and "Bagpipes"
(from [DANI:what Bartok work?]), and a sampling of Kodaly. * * *
Tonight's
concert is twice timely. As an alternate concert template, it
carries forward a type of programming initiated by the Brooklyn
Philharmonic at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the 1990s. One
such Brooklyn Philharmonic program, "Csardas!", was the
germ for the present collaboration; others - always with the
participation of performers from outside classical music -
investigated the influence on concert composers of flamenco, of
Indonesian gamelan, of Russian folk song and dance, of
African-American plantation song and jazz. (Bartok, who famously
collaborated with Benny Goodman, in 1928 advised white Americans
to pay more attention to jazz , and also to black music "in
its unspoiled, natural state.")
A
stirring feature of such programming is the synergy of musics and
performers. And there is a second rationale. These are
transitional times for Western classical music, times of new
borders crossed and old boundaries blurred. "World music"
and "global music" have attained unprecedented
popularity and influence, not least among composers. Such sui
generis stylists as Steve Reich and Philip Glass are unthinkable
absent the music of Africa and Asia. An important new generation
of Chinese-American composers - including Bright Sheng, whose [Ed:
what's the name of his quartet?] was commissioned by the Takacs
String Quartet - has pioneered in crafting a personal symbiosis of
East and West. This new diversity can lead in profitless
directions. The Cornell University ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman
warns: "musical borders can be crossed, but the value of
crossing them depends on the degree to which you respect them."
To which the composer/ethnomusicologist Michael Tenzer, a
specialist in Balinese music, adds: "We may hope to
distinguish between hybrid musics that are exploitative and those
that are genuine, those that are slapdash and those designed with
care, those that are experimental novelties and those with the
potential endure." It is no wonder that, for composers such
as Bright Sheng, Bartok serves as a model.
BARTOK
ON COLLECTING FOLK TUNES
"The
nature of collecting meant that I could turn only to older people,
mainly to older peasant women, because only they knew the old
songs. They had to sing into the phonograph, and I made notations.
The Hungarians and the Szekelys quickly understood what it was all
about. They smelled money, but they didn't ask. Out of modesty,
out of pride. But how difficult it is to persuade an old woman to
sing. Why should she sing, just to be mocked by men from the city?
Every one of them suspected something, a trap, which they didn't
want to fall into. We had to resort to cunning, to talk and talk.
Finally the old peasant woman would give in. She would begin to
sing, but in the middle she would suddenly give up. She changed
her mind. She wouldn't sing after all. What for? Then we had to
begin a new line of attack, another tack with other pretexts,
until the recording succeeded. Everywhere the peasants are
reserved before the upper classes. Collecting goes somewhat more
easily among the Slovaks, but with the Rumanians even the young
people could hardly be persuaded to sing. With these two peoples,
however, the song had a "fixed price." As soon as I
arrived, news got out that a "traveling agent for songs"
was among them, and they made sure they were paid properly. It
went most smoothly with the Arabs - in 1913 I collected in Biskra
- I had a letter of introduction to the sheik, who ordered his
subjects to sing. They belted out the songs like opera singers."
--
from a 1925 newspaper interview, translated by David E. Schneider,
as published in Peter Laki (ed.), Bartok and His World (Princeton
University Press, 1995).
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Our
collaboration with the Takacs Quartet can be dated back to the
Aspen Music festival in 2001. Although we knew each other from the
time when Takacs lived in Hungary, Joseph Horowitz made the two
goup to meet, the joint concert was his idea. The idea was to show
the direct connections of some music of Brahms and Liszt to the
gypsy "csárdás" music, and for the second
part of the concert the connections between the folk music and the
compositions of Bela Bartok. Both Muzsikas and Takacs liked more
the second part of the concert. Therefore we decided a different
concept for the future: "Bartok, Kodaly and the traditions".
Joe Horowitz also liked this concept, and after Muzsikas and
Takacs agreed with the program, Joe wrote a scientific background
of the whole project. We would like to express our thanks for it.