Pitch-Set Derivations from the Folk Modes in Bartok's Music

Abstract

With the free use of the folk modes and the subsequent disappearance of the triad as a basic harmonic premise in the course of Bart6k's compositional evolution, the establishment of both local and large-scale structural coherence became exclusively reliant on intervallic relationships. Bart6k himself commented that the use of the diatonic scale in the form of the old modes eventually led to a new conception of the chromatic scale, every tone of which came to be considered of equal value and could be used freely and independently.' As a consequence of these developments, the intervallic 'pitch-cell' emerged as a primary integrative element. The concept of a 'cell' in Bart6k's music refers to a set of pitch-classes exclusively defined by its intervallic content without fixed ordering.2 This essay is intended to demonstrate that certain pitchcells in Bart6k's music are fundamentally derived from the structural properties of the folk modes and that they serve as a new means of establishing tonality and progression. In the Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, Op. 20, for piano (1920), the closing statement of an authentic folk tune from the district of Szilagy is accompanied by a harmonic progression (Ex. la) exclusively based on five of the six possible transpositions of a special tetrachord (also shown in Ex. Ib). One of the basic properties of this tetrachord is its symmetrical construction--one half intervallically mirrors the other half. This tetrachord, which can be analyzed into three interval couples (including two tritones, two perfect fourths, and two