Jürgen Hunkemöller, Bauernmusik und Klangmagie: Bartók-Studien

Abstract

Jurgen Hunkemoller, Bauernmusik und Klangmagie: Bartok-Studien (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2013 ISBN: 9783487150987)ln the foreword of his book, Jurgen Hunkemoller recalls his fascinating first encounter during his student years with Bartok's music. But he came to closely looking at the composer's output and actually writing about it only two decades later, in 1982, when he contributed his monograph on Music for Strings, Percussions and Celesta to the series, Meisterwerke der Musik. This was the experience that inspired him for further investigations of the composer's style, initially approaching it from the angles of his expertise: Mozart and jazz.1 Then a series of studies ensued in which the author was probing into various aspects of the music: its structural solutions, its relationship to tradition while being at the cutting edge of its time, as well as the influence of history and personal life experiences on Bartok's artistic decisions. The harvest of thirty years of Bartok studies, twelve essays by the most persevering and accomplished Bartok scholar from musicology's German language area is offered to the public in this book.The essays are presented in four chapters. The three essays of the first chapter, Komponieren im 20. Jahrhundert, casts a wide view on the composer's character and his significance in his time, thus serving as an introduction to Bartok, the man and his music. The very first essay, Ortsbestimmung, defines Bartok's position among his contemporaries, examining his relationship with Schoenberg and Stravinsky, his statements about their influences on his own music. This is followed by an overview and assessment of the nature of the composer's self-analyses, with special attention to the works or movements in palindrome form, finding the answer for their confinement to structural elements in Bartok's reserved character and his schooling in the tradition of German music theory. The essay Das Beginnen der Musik Bartoks follows the path-breaking work of Laszlo Vikarius2 in a neglected area of music analysis, while giving an insight into the composer's style examining four unconventional types of movements: folk music adaptations, palindrome structures, movements beginning with quotations and with unaccompanied melodies.Gattungen, Sujets, Topoi is the title of the next group of essays where four traditional movement-types are investigated: Klage, Nacht, Choral, and Scherzo. Each of these essays begins with a meticulous review of the different meanings of the word, its use through the ages and its significance for the composer and his work. Before analyzing two representative movements in the first essay, Hunkemoller lists twenty-two works in three categories that contain movements or sections that can be associated with sorrow. The Scherzo also has a prominent presence in Bartok's music and the essay surveys its occurrences from the earliest works to its different manifestations in Bartok's mature style, some of more traditional structure and some of original design. In contrast, the title Choral was used only once by Bartok, in No. 35 in the Mikrokosmos series, which, moreover, as Hunkemoller concludes, cannot be easily associated with the type. But there are two late compositions, the middle section of the 2nd movement of the Concerto for Orchestra, and the 2nd movement of the 3rd Piano Concerto that are eminent representatives of traditional choral writing and both have a thoughtful analysis in the book. The longest essay of the volume, Nacht, deals only with those three works where the word night is explicitly present, No. 97 of the Mikrokosmos (Notturno), the 4th movement of Out of Doors (Night Music) and the final scene of the Bluebeard's Castle, but drawing into the argument biographical data and documents of the composer's world view and poetique musicale.In the third section of the book (Klangwelten) the influence of folk music, Mozart's music, and jazz is considered. …