Dominique Pagani sees Bartók above all as the counter-example of a learned music cut off from the people. He describes him as an ethnomusicologist who records popular music around the Mediterranean, the Maghreb included, and draws rhythms, modes and sound scales from it12. He links him, with Liszt and Kodály, to a Hungarian national school that he considers independent of the Russian tradition. He places Bartók's quartets at the summit of twentieth-century music and finds them symmetrical with Beethoven's late quartets, in which one seems already to hear Bartók34. In the finale of the Fourth Quartet, he points to a silly melody taken up again in polytonality: a calculated collage of the popular and the learned5. He calls the use of strings, percussion and celesta in the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta revolutionary. He presents the Mikrokosmos as a teaching method that brings other sound scales to the ear from the very start. He also recalls Bartók's destitute exile in the United States, until the commission of the Concerto for Orchestra6.
Summary produced automatically from 19 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.
Who is this?
Béla Viktor János Bartók (; Hungarian:; 25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Among his notable works are the opera Bluebeard's Castle, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the Concerto for Orchestra and six string quartets. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology. […]
9:39Concerto for OrchestraExiled in the United States during the rise of Nazism, he lives there in poverty until the commission of the Concerto for Orchestra.
10:53Recorded investigation around the Mediterranean, including the Maghreb, into rhythms, modes and tonal scales.
11:37Music for Strings, Percussion and CelestaRevolutionary use of strings over a rich percussion background, with the celesta; a work of genius full of traditional rhythms.
Series · 13 Jul 2022BARTÓK - THE UNHEARD-OF SOUND • Pagani Parle Musique
