‘They call him a “folklorist” or
an “almost serialist” composer and place him under the rubric “East European
School”’[1]
states Judit Frigyesi, describing the popular reception of Béla
Bartók.
This inbetweeness in style presented in Frigyesi’s quote summarises the
accumulative nature of Bartók’s style: he is somewhere in between
these two extremes of archaic folk style and the contemporaneous serialist
style. The implications of which infer that Bartók’s mode of composition is an
accumulative one, drawing from both sides of this polarity. Thus, if nothing
else, Frigyesis’s statement is a testament to the success of hybridity in Bartók’s
musical style, nevertheless one that remains difficult to discern and
appropriate immediate meaning to. In this brief overview of Bartók’s
idiom and output a variety of themes will be exposed and explored including
musical expressionism, the aesthetic categories of the grotesque and the
decadent, and finally Bartok’s own relationship with folk music. In each instance
of engagement with these themes perspectives from contemporary scholarly
literature will be offered to suggest potential reasons for Bartók’s
engagement with them. Throughout this short summary I pose a question that
should be considered throughout, what was the intended effect of Bartók’s
hybridity?
One of the most frequent comments
made by listeners of Bartók is that there exists an emotional immediacy to his
music. The visceral nature of Bartók’s idiom is a theme that is returned
to again and again in modern scholarship. Bartók’s own statement on the
matter of emotional intuition in his composing lends weight to viewing his
music through an expressionistic lens, ‘all my music is in the first place a
matter of feeling and instinct. Do not ask me why I have written thus and not
otherwise. I can only give one answer to this: I wrote the way I felt’[2].
This expressionist sensibility however presents itself as an incongruent
development when Bartók’s earlier post-romantic works are considered within his style.
So what changed? What inspired the transition from the assertive grandiose of
Bartok’s tone poem Kossuth (1905) to
the existential anxiety of Two Portraits
(1908)? To find the origin of this impetus for stylistic change it would be
prudent to consider Bartók’s position as a musician inside fin-de-siècle thought.
It was the writings of Friedrich
Nietzsche that many believe to have captured the essence of the age, works such
as Also Sprach Zarathustra, Human, All
too Human and The Gay Science were
pervasive texts. Nietzschean thought and its proactive pessimism resonated with
a society whose previous ideological tenets of meaning, the hope of spiritual
transcendentalism and redemption through religion, had been crushed by
scientific discoveries in such fields such as atomic science and theoretical
physics. Nietzsche’s affirmation that ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we
have killed him’, perfectly encapsulated the existential threshold that many
felt man had crossed. Nietzsche’s renouncement of religion, and all
metaphysical structures of hierarchy in general, were complemented by his
encouragement for the subject to be inspired by their ‘Will to Power’. In short
one should no longer invest faith in acts of redemption or closure, the
subjects only choice is to accept the materialism and meaninglessness of life
and find purpose in their own previously repressed Will.
This refocusing of contemporary thought
around the latent power of the subject was innate to the development of
movements concerned with identity and subjectivity, the apotheosis of which
being Freud’s psychoanalysis. The painter Wassily Kandinsky describes this
reconfiguration of perspective in terms that evoke Nietzsche’s influence on
this transition, ‘Men of learning . . . cast doubt on that very matter which
was yesterday the foundation of everything … When outer supports threaten to
fall, man turns his gaze from externals in onto himself’[3].
Bartók
eagerly expressed his affinity to the thoughts of Nietzsche in a short outburst
of reproach to Irmy Jurkovics in 1905, ‘What!!You are rebuking me for being a
pessimist?!! Me, a follower of Nietzsche?!!’[4].
It is through engagement with Nietzschean thought then that Bartók
departs from his previous post-romantic aesthetic, exhibited in Kossuth and violin concerto no.1, into a
new expressionist mode concerned with the realism of subjectivity. Features of this
new idiom are observable in the first movement of Bartók’s string quartet no.1, and
an attempt at elucidating some of these will be the basis for a brief
examination of the opening bars of the work now.
The opening bars have a solemn
but incredibly nuanced character. It is uncertain exactly what the object of
focus is, a suggested tonality of f minor is slowly subverted as the material
of the opening two bars is compressed and reiterated in different chromatic
variants. The recycling of the same rhythmic and intervallic contours, however,
confirms that these opening bars are not contingent to each other, the affects
in them are linked. In imitative chromatic counterpoint the second violin
traces the falls of the first violin in a fashion that both exaggerates the
plummeting motions of the leading first violin but obscures them at the same
time. While negating the use of conventional diatonic techniques, Bartók
is able to evince a complicated feeling of encumbering remorse that
nevertheless remains coherent throughout. Emotions are never clean and
solitary, therefore, according to the realist ambitions of the expressionists,
neither should art be in exposing them.
A second and popular topic in
Bartók
scholarship is the role of the grotesque in his work. In her monograph Bartók
and the Grotesque Julie Brown goes to great lengths to situate the concept
of both the grotesque and the grotesque body in modernist thought. In a pithy
statement Brown elucidates the appeal and subsequent rise of the grotesque in
Romantic art of the previous century, ‘the category of the grotesque encapsulated
the fundamental Romantic dichotomy, namely the gap between the spiritual
aspirations of man and his physical limitations’[5].
As the foundations upon which the spiritual aspirations of Romantic thought
were undermined, however, the aesthetic category of the grotesque took on new
meaning. In the pervasive philosophy of Nietzsche, the body was the sovereign
site of all knowledge and meaning, this thought was reflected in Nietzsche’s
deep scepticism of language which he argued served no other purpose than constructing
and affirming categories around things we already knew. Importantly though,
music, being a non-linguistic artistic activity, was perceived as analogous to
physical gesture due to its ability to infer meaning without mediation.
Result of this thought was exhibited
in an increasing consciousness of the potential anthropomorphic features of
music. With the body as a reference point of meaning music became a metaphor
for immediate physical feeling. The Shostakovich scholar Esti Sheinberg
elaborates on this idea: ‘A Choice of a comfortable temp, like andante or
moderato, a register that accommodates the natural speaking voice and tempered
dynamics of sound would most probably render a ‘normal’, comfortable kind of
music’[6].
Nowhere is this outlook more obvious in Bartók’s work than in his
orchestral work Two Portraits. It has
been noted by Sheinberg that in the ‘Ideal Portrait’ formal elements such as
the range, tempo and textures in the music all sit ‘comfortably’ within the
gestural, or physical scope of the human body. The ‘Grotesque Portrait’ by
comparison covers a vast range, with a frenetically fast tempo and bizarre
layered timbres throughout. The idea insinuated here is that, through
exaggeration of the same features of the ‘Ideal Portrait’, and their relation
to bodily meaning, the listener is prompted to envisage these musical gestures
as correlating to the actions of a body in
extremis. It is through meaning elicited by reference to the body that an
effect of alienation and repulsion is generated by these works.
The decadent style is an elusive
one to define. Stephen Downes in Music
and Decadence in European Modernism plots the history of this aesthetic
concept and presents it as a self-conscious mode of art that is fixated on the
ideas of regression and regeneration. The idea of decadence is one generated by
an anxiety of what Downes calls ‘cultural vertigo’, the ‘loftier it (art) becomes,
the greater the sense of imminent decline and fall’[7].
Key themes for the decadent style are ones concerning decay, debasement or
transgression. An example investigated by Downes in his exposition of decadence
is Bartók’s
The Miraculous Mandarin. Summarising
the driving ideas behind the grotesque pantomime Downes proclaims that ‘The Miraculous Mandarin explores the
loss of ‘natural’ origins and relationships and the search for erotic renewal
in the decayed modern city’[8].
Examining the opening music of the work, Downes evinces the idea that Bartók
has created a perverse, artificial reconstruction of a pastoral setting, a
corrupted pastoral of the urban metropolis:
‘The first, sound, an ostinato
figure in the second violins is a mechanical, obsessively repeated ‘wave’
pattern – non-developmental, and ‘perverted’ because its spans and augmented
octave (G-G#) rather than the interval of the natural overtone series. It is an
unnatural figure churned out by the metropolitan machine’[9]
In ‘Eros in the Metropolis: Bartók’s
The Miraculous Mandarin’ Downes presents a further case for such a
reading of opening as a twisted imitation of nature with an acute parallel
drawn between the 6/8 metre of both The
Miraculous Mandarin and the overture
to Wagner’s Das Rheingold suggesting
that there is an acknowledgment and dismissal of the opening acting as a
‘metaphorical birth’[10].
In this instance Bartók exudes notions of decadence in his aesthetic construction
of a gulf between artificial, excessive means and establishment of forms
associated with the natural and untainted. Regeneration as theme is established
through an entrenched aesthetic dichotomy in the opening music of The Miraculous Mandarin which draws the
work into the realms of the decadent, obsessed with the anxieties of decay and
convalescence.
One aspect that constitutes a
large area of the discourse regarding Bartók’s music is that of his
proclivity for integrating folk music into his works. While the featuring of
folk music in western classical music was a relatively common phenomenon over
the course of the both the eighteenth and nineteenth century what was unique to
Bartók,
however, was the method for such integration. The second part of string quartet
no. 3 is a testament to Bartók’s commitment to preserving the
idiosyncratic features of folk music forms to as higher degree of fidelity as
possible. The incessant change in metre in an irregular fashion confirms a
self-conscious attempt not to impose any formal conventions on the folk tunes
he employs. Of particular interest is the manner in which this collected folk
material is set, using a tense erratic expressionist idiom. Expressed through a
visceral harmonic language the folk melodies fizz with a newly transfigured
vitality. Bartók’s predilection for folk music was by no means a casual
interest. Following on, but eventually diverging from the original writings of
Liszt on folk song, Bartók held the belief that peasant (a distinct type of folk)
music was the original source from which contemporary musical culture grew.
This account of the history of western musical culture based on an organic
paradigm would be the basis for Bartók’s use of folk music. As an origin
music, the élan vital within it may be
used to regenerate a now withering and bankrupt music culture.
As I hope to have presented in this
brief overview of Bartók scholarship, the themes that proliferate through the
discourse share profound commonality: a search for a physical means to
transfigure musical culture, urban capitalist society and general human
subjectivity to an ideal state. This is the ends to which Bartók
wills his hybrid forms and, while faith in redemption is a futile exercise in
Nietzsche’s Godless world, where there is a ‘Will’ there is a way.
Thomas Search
Bibliography
Bartók, quoted in Brown, Julie, ‘The Mandarin’s Miraculous
Body’, in Bartók and the Grotesque: studies in
modernity, the body and contradiction in music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). [1]
Bartók,
letter to his early biographer, Denijs Dille, quoted in John and Dorothy Crawford, Expressionism
in Twentieth-Century Music (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2003), 1.
Brown, Julie, ‘The
Mandarin’s Miraculous Body’, in Bartók and the Grotesque: studies in
modernity, the body and contradiction in music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
10.
Downes, Stephen,
‘Decadence, music and the map of Europena Modernism’, in Music and Decadence in European Modernism: The Case of Central and
Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3-4.
Downes,
Stephen, ‘Eros in the Metropolis: Bartok’s
Miraculous Mandarin’, Journal of
the Royal Musical Association 125
(2000), 41-61.
Frigyesi, Judit, ‘The
Formation of Bartók’s
Aesthetics’, in Béla
Bartók and
turn-of-the-century Budapest (London: University of California Press, 1998),
119.
Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans.
M. T. H Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), 12-15.
Sheinberg, Esti, Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in
the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory
of Musical Incongruities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 200), 211.
Photo credits
[1]
Frigyesi, Judit, ‘The Formation of Bartók’s Aesthetics’, in Béla
Bartók
and turn-of-the-century Budapest (London: University of California Press,
1998), 119.
[2] Bartók, letter to his early biographer, Denijs Dille,
quoted in John and Dorothy Crawford, Expressionism in Twentieth-Century
Music (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2003), 1.
[3] Wassily
Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in
Art, trans. M. T. H Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), 12-15.
[4]
Bartók,
quoted in Brown, Julie, ‘The Mandarin’s Miraculous Body’, in Bartók
and the Grotesque: studies in
modernity, the body and contradiction in music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
[5]
Brown, Julie, ‘The Mandarin’s Miraculous Body’, in Bartók and the Grotesque: studies in modernity, the body and
contradiction in music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) 10.
[6] Sheinberg,
Esti, Irony, Satire, Parody and the
Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A
Theory of Musical Incongruities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 200), 211.
[7]
Downes, Stephern, ‘Decadence, music and the map of Europena Modernism’, in Music and Decadence in European Modernism:
The Case of Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 3-4.
[8] Ibid,
123.
[9]
Idid.
[10] Downes, Stephen, ‘Eros in
the Metropolis: Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 125 (2000), 41-61.
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