David E. Schneider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality

Abstract

David E. Schneider, Bartok, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality (University of California Press, 2006 ISBN: 9780520245037)Although political scientists have foretold the decline of the nation-state for at least two decades, new nation-states continue to be bom.1 And while it is true that the new, rapidly emerging instruments of communication are driving our world's interconnectedness and interdependence at an unprecedented speed and in unimaginable fashion, the idea of nationalism, regarded as the chief force in the formation of the word we live in, cannot yet be relegated to the past. Scholars still grapple with this elusive idea and its multifarious manifestations and repercussions. The study of cultural nationalism, along with its responsibility for the horrendous outcomes of the actions of the extreme forms of political nationalism in the 20th century, is a field where important new contributions have been produced recently. Even if the phenomenon of nationalism in becomes an infinite vanishing point rather than an absolute historical category, as Daniel M. Grimley put it,2 works of representative musicians are increasingly scrutinized along these lines. Richard Taruskin, one of the most influential champions of the field of understanding musical nationalism, inspired several of his students to focus on issues of this phenomenon and David Schneider's book is a prominent example of the outstanding results of these investigations.Bela Bartok was commonly tight-lipped with explanations of his music. But when he did offer some information, he was eager to point out the roots his had in folk music. He also declared that while he was drawing on the of all nationalities he studied as a scholar, he felt that since character and milieu must somehow harmonize with each other, the Hungarian influence was the strongest in his work.1 Here he was referring to the influence of Hungarian folk music. But the tradition of nineteenth-century Hungarian also had a great impact on Bartok's music. The composer's changing relationship to this tradition, its role in the development of Bartok's modernist style, its implications in the reception of the composer's work in Hungarian society during the stormy first four decades of the century is the objective of Schneider's elegantly devised book. In roughly chronological order, starting with Bartok's early career and ending with his emigration in 1940, each of the six chapters focuses on a different attitude of the composer to the tradition of nineteenth-century Hungarian music. Each chapter is introduced with a richly documented description of the political and cultural background and each chapter has masterful musical analyses of a well-chosen selection of compositions.Tradition Rejected, the first chapter of the book, introduces the reader to the main representatives of the nineteenth-century Hungarian style, the ver bunkos, and its vocal counterpart, the magyar nota (or Hungarian art song), commonly known as music because of their chief propagators, the Gypsy bands. Bringing together historical documents, examples of folk and musical compositions from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Schneider presents the function, structural, and musical characteristics of this phenomenon with rarely found completeness and clarity. Bartok's irritation towards the popular manifestations of this style was deep-rooted. On 19 May 1902, when the 21-year-old academy student wrote to his mother about an unexpected visit with some musician friends to a coffee house in Budapest to listen to Gypsy music, - apparently not his idea, since he added in parenthesis an exclamation mark -, he explained: Because that Gypsy is something extraordinary, not like the others.4 Schneider argues that the young Bartok rejected this mainly because its influence was admittedly more prevalent in lighter compositions. …