Bartók's String Quartet No. 4/III: A New Interpretative Approach

Abstract

Despite the diversity of analytical approaches towards the music of Bela Bartok, most are directed exclusively towards the listener and do not overtly address any issues of performance. Concerns of performers only tend to be accommodated in the context of Bartok's own recordings and therefore exclude a large part of his compositional output. The orientation towards performers provided here attempts to redress this balance while challenging the role played by a number of analytical approaches. A voice-leading analysis, for example, such as that of the first movement of Bartok's Fourth String Quartet by Roy Travis,1 may provide a sense of movement and overall direction, but it does not equip performers with what they need to know in the context of post-tonal works, where explicit articulation is beginning to replace conventional voice-leading. The Fourth Quartet (1928) is a representative work because, of all Bartok's quartets, it has the greatest abundance of articulation markings. Yet the third movement is not over-endowed with such markings; the composer uses them sparingly and specifically. In this movement, which he describes as the 'kernel' of the work,2 his resourcefulness and mastery of texture and instrumental techniques enable him to blend a mixture of background influences into a highly individualised idiom. The priority he gives to performance indications as a means of characterising his melodic and harmonic structures prompts an alternative analytical approach that demonstrates both how the practice of performance can determine issues of analysis and, conversely, how issues of analysis may determine the practice of performance. The rhetorical character of this movement has, until now, worked against a detailed analysis of its melody and expressive content. Yet it is Bartok's novel exploitation of speech-like rhythmic elements, also evident in the melodies of folksongs, which determines the content and unusual structure of this movement. A parallel can even be drawn between the function of articulation and accentuation in Baroque music and in folk tunes; both seem to have influenced Bartok's articulation. Indeed, the interpretative strategy I propose for Bartok's work shows remarkable affinities with existing suggestions for the