Bartók's orchestral music and the modern world

Abstract

In his essay, ‘Out of Hungary: Bartok, Modernism, and the Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Music’, Leon Botstein has argued that the composer ‘uniquely managed to reconcile the claims of formal musical modernism with the cultural politics of identity and subjective musical particularity’. While the music Bartok wrote between the end of the First World War and around 1930 does seem to be preoccupied with issues addressed by modernist composers such as Schoenberg (and the other members of the Second Viennese School), it should be noted that he could be sceptical, if not distinctly unsympathetic, towards some ‘revolutionary’ modernist artists. This can be discerned in his comments about Mondrian, Haba, Hauer and others in the first of a series of lectures given at Harvard University in 1943, where he considers the synchronic appearance of ‘revolutionary tendencies’ in all three branches of the arts. In Mondrian's case he grudgingly admits some public success, but he observes that ‘in literature there was less success, and in music no success at all’. Although his response to a modernist artistic aesthetic may at times seem ambiguous or ambivalent, Bartok appears to have been a firm advocate and disciple of the ‘project of modernity’. Modernity, as characterized by Jonathan Ree, is concerned with an underlying epistemological contrast: ‘the modern world is enlightened, scientific, and disappointed, whereas its predecessor was superstitious, gullible and magical’.