Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra
I probably should be writing about the Treasury's bailout scheme for rescuing the Israeli economy, or the situation in Gaza. But, instead I am writing about Bela Bartok, the great composer, who died in 1945. The reason being that we went to an excellent lecture last night given by our favorite musicologist Brenda Miller.
I must say that I skipped the lectures on Haydn and Mahler, having heard about them before. But, she had never discussed Bartok, one of my favorite composers. I was introduced to him by my musician friend Andrew Read in Cambridge many years ago, and I have loved his music every since, in a way that is more visceral than my love of other traditional composers, such as Mozart, Beethoven and even Stravinsky or Shostakovitch. Perhaps only now, after listening to her lecture, that specifically analyzed movements from his brilliant Concerto for Orchestra, composed in 1943, can I understand why.
In order to understand Bartok, one must start with the fact that he was a Hungarian nationalist, not in the extreme political sense, but in the sense of having pride in his country, and as a musician decided in 1905, with his friend Zoltan Kodaly, to go out into the countryside and collect Hungarian folk music. In doing so, they were part of a nascent movement throughout Europe that sought inspiration in the music of the people. Although they had only a small early tape recorder, they persevered and over a period of ca. 30 years collected 13,000 recordings of genuine folk music! In doing so, Bartok emphasized the common origins and overlap of many other local music traditions, including Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, etc. In doing so he was also attempting to develop a modern Hungarian music based on Hungarian themes and not centered on the German classical tradition based in Vienna, during a time when the Austro-Hungarian Empire still existed and Hungary was dominated by Austria.
One of the differences he noted between Hungarian folk music and classical German music is that it's themes are often not symmetrical. In other words, whereas in German classical music each bar of music is the same length and the themes are often repeated or inverted, in Hungarian music they were often of different lengths, with a long bar followed by a short bar. This is what gave Hungarian music it's characteristic energy and verve.
What's more Bartok noted that the lengths of the long and short bars were related to each other by what is known as the "Golden section." This is the ratio of lengths that humans find particularly pleasing, such as in the ratio of the sides of a book, or of a windoiw or a doorway. This ratio was discovered by the ancient Greeks when making such perfect statues of the human form, and was later rediscovered by the renaissance painters and allowed them to develop correct perspective. In other words this "Golden" ratio of 1 to 0.618 is found in nature and can be shown to be a constant by geometry, much like pi is the ratio of the circumferance to the radius of a circle. Further, an Italian mathematician of the 13th century named Fibonacci found that a series of numbers related to each other, namely 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89... obtained by adding the previous two numbers together, gave approximately the same ratios in their higher terms as the Golden ratio.
So Bartok used this ratio in his compositions, rather than adhere to the classical German symmetrical form, and as such was an innovator. But, his innovation was not based on using different chords as for example Schoenberg's twelve tone music, but rather in the compositional relationship of the bars. As far as I know Bartok was the only serious musician to do this.
Because of his anti-Fascist views, Bartok was forced to leave Hungary that was then controlled by the pro-Nazi Horthy regime. When his mother died in 1939 he managed to escape to the US and arrived in NY with his family, unknown and penniless, and just before the US became embroiled in WWII. He was in dire poverty and became very ill, and was virtually on his death bed in 1942 with leukemia when visited by his Hungarian friend Serge Koussevitsky, who offered him $1,000, a huge sum, to write a major piece of music. Somehow this stirred Bartok, and he wrote most of the Concerto for Orchestra while still in the hospital. He recovered for a time and died in 1945 after hearing the first performance of his masterpiece.
What makes this composition so unique is that Bartok used the "golden section" as the basis of most of the composition in a thoroughly modern piece. He did compose other pieces of music, such as the startling "Sonata for two pianos and percussion" and the beautiful "Music for strings, percussion and celeste," but none of the magnitude of the Concerto for Orchestra. One further note about this Concerto, that consists of five movements, is that in the fourth movement he has a section that reproduces exactly the famous theme from Shostakovitch's Seventh ("Leningrad") symphony. But, in doing so he interjects a jocular theme after it, as if poking fun at a rival, or at the kind of "monumental" theme music that is so common a feature of Russian and European music.
Overall, I found Brenda Miller's lecture outstanding in that it definitely gave me new insight into a piece of music that I have listened to many times over the years.
Brenda Miller's web site is www.music-lovers.co.il
I must say that I skipped the lectures on Haydn and Mahler, having heard about them before. But, she had never discussed Bartok, one of my favorite composers. I was introduced to him by my musician friend Andrew Read in Cambridge many years ago, and I have loved his music every since, in a way that is more visceral than my love of other traditional composers, such as Mozart, Beethoven and even Stravinsky or Shostakovitch. Perhaps only now, after listening to her lecture, that specifically analyzed movements from his brilliant Concerto for Orchestra, composed in 1943, can I understand why.
In order to understand Bartok, one must start with the fact that he was a Hungarian nationalist, not in the extreme political sense, but in the sense of having pride in his country, and as a musician decided in 1905, with his friend Zoltan Kodaly, to go out into the countryside and collect Hungarian folk music. In doing so, they were part of a nascent movement throughout Europe that sought inspiration in the music of the people. Although they had only a small early tape recorder, they persevered and over a period of ca. 30 years collected 13,000 recordings of genuine folk music! In doing so, Bartok emphasized the common origins and overlap of many other local music traditions, including Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, etc. In doing so he was also attempting to develop a modern Hungarian music based on Hungarian themes and not centered on the German classical tradition based in Vienna, during a time when the Austro-Hungarian Empire still existed and Hungary was dominated by Austria.
One of the differences he noted between Hungarian folk music and classical German music is that it's themes are often not symmetrical. In other words, whereas in German classical music each bar of music is the same length and the themes are often repeated or inverted, in Hungarian music they were often of different lengths, with a long bar followed by a short bar. This is what gave Hungarian music it's characteristic energy and verve.
What's more Bartok noted that the lengths of the long and short bars were related to each other by what is known as the "Golden section." This is the ratio of lengths that humans find particularly pleasing, such as in the ratio of the sides of a book, or of a windoiw or a doorway. This ratio was discovered by the ancient Greeks when making such perfect statues of the human form, and was later rediscovered by the renaissance painters and allowed them to develop correct perspective. In other words this "Golden" ratio of 1 to 0.618 is found in nature and can be shown to be a constant by geometry, much like pi is the ratio of the circumferance to the radius of a circle. Further, an Italian mathematician of the 13th century named Fibonacci found that a series of numbers related to each other, namely 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89... obtained by adding the previous two numbers together, gave approximately the same ratios in their higher terms as the Golden ratio.
So Bartok used this ratio in his compositions, rather than adhere to the classical German symmetrical form, and as such was an innovator. But, his innovation was not based on using different chords as for example Schoenberg's twelve tone music, but rather in the compositional relationship of the bars. As far as I know Bartok was the only serious musician to do this.
Because of his anti-Fascist views, Bartok was forced to leave Hungary that was then controlled by the pro-Nazi Horthy regime. When his mother died in 1939 he managed to escape to the US and arrived in NY with his family, unknown and penniless, and just before the US became embroiled in WWII. He was in dire poverty and became very ill, and was virtually on his death bed in 1942 with leukemia when visited by his Hungarian friend Serge Koussevitsky, who offered him $1,000, a huge sum, to write a major piece of music. Somehow this stirred Bartok, and he wrote most of the Concerto for Orchestra while still in the hospital. He recovered for a time and died in 1945 after hearing the first performance of his masterpiece.
What makes this composition so unique is that Bartok used the "golden section" as the basis of most of the composition in a thoroughly modern piece. He did compose other pieces of music, such as the startling "Sonata for two pianos and percussion" and the beautiful "Music for strings, percussion and celeste," but none of the magnitude of the Concerto for Orchestra. One further note about this Concerto, that consists of five movements, is that in the fourth movement he has a section that reproduces exactly the famous theme from Shostakovitch's Seventh ("Leningrad") symphony. But, in doing so he interjects a jocular theme after it, as if poking fun at a rival, or at the kind of "monumental" theme music that is so common a feature of Russian and European music.
Overall, I found Brenda Miller's lecture outstanding in that it definitely gave me new insight into a piece of music that I have listened to many times over the years.
Brenda Miller's web site is www.music-lovers.co.il
posted by Jack Cohen at 8:12 AM
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