Reaction to the Groves Reading on Béla Bartók (MuCT 514, Fall 2006)

First, I have to confess that I know very little about Bartók, in regards to either of his roles as composer or ethnomusicologist. In a few of the theory courses I took in my undergraduate career we touched on his compositions and usages of folk melodies, but we never really discussed his history, his passion for creating a unique style of his own, or his influences early in his compositional career.

Personally, I believe his quest to find a unique style of compositional technique is an interesting subject that I might delve into at some point. It would be interesting to listen to his compositions pre-folk tune influence and those that followed, particularly after his ‘Transylvanian tour.’ In the Grove article it states that Busoni found Bartók’s Fourteen Bagatelles to be “at last something truly new.” This statement peaks my interest in that Bartók began to create ‘new music’ that was inspired by ‘old music.’ I find that this ‘revelation’ by Bartók plays into the idea that a better understanding of the past bears fruit in the future. By embracing the stylistic traits of Hungarian (and other European) folk tunes, he was able to transform his style and compositional practices into something unique and interesting.

This positive influence of the folk tunes on Bartók’s compositional career is two-sided. On one side was the accessibility of these works after his collection of them, and how he could – as many could have and have themselves – use the tunes as either melodic, rhythmic, and textual models for new works. The other side is how specifically the older, less heterogeneous Hungarian tunes embraced the ecclesiastical (Aeolian/Dorian) or pentatonic modes that provided material straying away from the tonal compositions he was writing earlier in his career. Due to the burgeoning usage of chromaticism and atonality in the early 20th century, Bartók could use the folk tunes to embrace this new direction in music. In essence, he utilized tradition to adapt his compositional technique into a more contemporary style. The topic of utilizing old/traditional and new/contemporary falls into an area that I am personally very interested in: the bridging of early and new music.