Bartok Work Research Articles

Golden ratio and Fibonacci sequence in music: Characteristics of Bartók's creative approach

The paper aims at presenting the specifications of manifestations of the golden ratio proportion and Fibonacci sequence in music with a special reference to Bartok's works. As the analyses by the Hungarian author Ernő Lendvai are considered to be the first attempts to study the aforementioned phenomena within a musical work, a particular attention was devoted in the text to his theoretical and analytical achievements. The paper points to some of the issues related to the analysis of the golden ratio in music, with the intention to answer two questions: when did composers start applying the proportion, and what might have been their possible motives for this act? The issue of Bartok's motivation for the use of golden ratio and Fibonacci sequence is considered from the aspect of his pantheistic viewpoints and his desire to implement laws of nature into music.

Bartok, Hungary, and the renewal of tradition: case studies in the intersection of modernity and nationality

Bartok, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality. By David E. Schneider. (California Studies in 20th-Century Music, 5). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. [xi, 308 p. ISBN 13: 978-0-520-24503-7 (cloth); ISBN 10: 0-52024503-2 (cloth) $49.95] David Schneider's new study, incorporating materials from his dissertation, is a valuable addition to a growing body of Bartok literature. This volume does not strive to be a and study, but rather consists of six focused essays, each of which deals in some way with musical traditions that Bartok encountered, absorbed, and then either transformed or rejected. Five of the chapters deal with Bartok's interaction with Hungarian traditions: not only the popular gypsy musics of verbunkos and magyar nota, and the rural peasant traditions that Bartok spent so much of his life studying, but also the Hungarian symphonic and operatic traditions of the nineteenth century. Interspersed with the fascinating wealth of historical background which situates Bartok's work in these various Hungarian contexts are analyses of several of Bartok's major works. remaining chapter is entitled Confronting Stravinsky, and, as the only chapter not dealing with Hungarian influences on Bartok, seems a bit out of place. It is a revised and considerably expanded version of a previous article of Schneider's (Bartok and Stravin sky: Respect, Competition, Influence, and the Hungarian Reaction to Modernism in the 1920s), published in a volume of essays edited by Peter Laki, Bartok and His World (Prince ton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Schneider does an admirable job in his opening chapters of untangling the various strands of Hungarian musical culture that influenced Bartok in his formative years. He begins by referring to a 1911 essay of Bartok's entitled On Hungarian Music. Bartok wrote, The of Bihari, Lavotta, and a few foreigners ... that is to say, nothing but more or less dilettante musicians all under the influence of and unworthy of the admiration of people of good taste ... Only dilettante musicologists can discuss these dilettante works in a serious tone of voice ... it is surely not Hungarian but Gypsy. That is, its characteristics are the melodic distortions of a foreign people, of the Gypsies (p. 12). Bartok's polemical essay was reprinted thirteen times in a variety of languages, but, as Schneider carefully explains, verbunkos and magyar nota, the instrumental and vocal styles, respectively, of Hungarian popular music, both out of a combination of elements from both art and folk music (p. 25). And the Gypsy music for which Bartok had such a strong distaste is not easily defined. Generally, it referred to the style of performed in cafes by musicians, and which would include verbunkos as well as other popular European idioms. Bartok's essay grew out of the fact that he ... was frustrated with the privileged position of in Hungarian society, seeing it as ... a hindrance to the acceptance of his own scholarly and creative work (p. 27). Schneider returns to folk in his fifth chapter, Tradition Transcribed, an account of the political difficulties created by Bartok's researches into folk music. As relations between Hungary and Romania deteriorated in the 1920s and 1930s, the composer's research drew criticism from both sides of the border. Bartok's Romanian Folk Songs from the Bihar District (Hungary) was described in the journal Sezetoarea as of no value whatsoever, as the author accused Bartok of having Hungarianized the melodies. …

Bartók, Lendvai und die Lage der ungarischen Komposition um 1955

The year 1955 has a special importance for the compositional thinking in Hungary, because it was the year in which Ernő Lendvai's studies of Bela Bartok appeared (Bartok's Style and An Introduction to the Analysis of Bartok's Works). These writings were intended to prove the modernity of his music, a modernity that was comparable to Western-European dodecaphony and serialism. Hungarian composers, attempting to liberate themselves from the dictatorical aesthetic theory of the fifties, saw in Lendvai's publications a kind of instruction book, a Kompositionslehre which could help them to renew Hungarian composition. Model scales, Bartok's harmonic formulas and the Golden Section were understood in this context as devices of modernity in new music. Young Hungarian composers had begun to follow Bartok's path as early as in the mid-twenties. Until 1955, however, this had meant only a stylistic imitation of his works: Bartok's musical language represented for them the modern manner of self-expression. The conse...

Invention, Form, Narrative in Béla Bartók's Music

In spite of his mistrust in giving public explanations about his compositions, Bartok worked with great care on what we may call the narrative of a piece - the “spirit of the work” in his phrasing (spirit in the sense of the German Geist, the meaning, the characteristic quality). His “plans were concerned with the spirit of the new work and with technical problems (for instance, formal structure involved by the spirit of the work)” (Harvard Lectures, 1943). The best source to understand the narrative of multi-movement Bartok works is a close study of the creative process, primarily the sketches and the draft. The genesis of the Violin Concerto (1937-1938) reveals that to Zoltan Szekely's request in 1936 Bartok first proposed a one-movement Konzertstuck in variation form, i.e. the second movement. In the next step a full-size sonata-form piece emerging from the Tempo di verbunkos opening theme (as Bartok identified its character) of the present first movement could also have been an alternative one-movemen...

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

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