Bartók's Fourth String Quartet - 5 (The Musical Language)

Hoday,

To understand the language of Belá Bartók, one must understand the heritage and the culture from where he came. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Bartók was actively pursuing the collection of national folk music of Hungary. By using the recording devices invented by film and recording experts Edison, Dickson, and Eastman, Bartók collected hundreds of musical samples of his Hungarian heritage before the destruction caused by war.(4) By 1928, at the age of 47, Bartók had composed 13 complete genres of music with 28 total pieces ranging from orchestra, piano, violin, to opera, ballet, a pantomime, a symphonic poem, and four string quartets most containing information taken from his Hungarian folk song research.

The evolution of Bartók's musical language is perhaps best represented in the compositions of his string quartets. They contain a natural understanding of the string instruments possibly with influence by his training under János Koessler, Hans von Koessler composer, who was acquainted with Istvan Thoman, a student of Franz Liszt, as well as the music of Wagner and Strauss, both of whom Bartók knew personally.

According to Elliott Antokoletz, the quartets themselves were composed over a period of thirty-one years. The first three were written in 1908, 1917, and 1927. The lyrical and romantic styles link directly to many composers of the early twentieth century but by the third and fourth quartets abstract and expressionistic styles began to develop.
The last three quartets , written between 1928, 1934, and 1939 move in opposite direction devoid of tonality. It is especially the fourth string quartet that specifically contain the correct amount of motivic structures that become more familiar as the piece develops and follows a form that uniquely blends the nineteenth and twentieth century together along with the modality and history of Hungarian Folk Music.

Antokoletz writes about Bartók's analytical and theoretical studies as distinct and diverse, and says that Bartók was influenced by the geographic separation from his homeland. He claims that this separation perhaps accounted for influences in nurturing theories more relevant to traditional modality in Hungarian Folk Music. The separation, however, between Bartók and his homeland may or may not have existed but it may have contributed to the fourth string quartet by the influences from the second Viennese school, Arab modality, the atrocities inflicted to his homeland after World War 1, world tensions between the wars mixed with his interests of traditional sonata form, fugue, and his natural abilities to compose complicated asymmetries of music. All which are integral to the fourth string quartet as Bartók used compositional tools with conventional arch forms and motives that were altered in the simplicities of resultant patterns, retrogrades, and inversions.

Halsey Stevens writes that, "Hungarian peasant music has a number of different categories that include pentatonic scales, nonarchitectural parlando rubato and tempo giusto styles surrounded by architecturally rounded forms and heptatonic scales such as Dorian, Aeolian, modern major, Mixolydian, Phrygian and sometimes modern minor."(6) The fourth quartet contains many of these modes with mixed characters of dynamic expression and other blends of pitch construction. It also demonstrates pure natural ability combined with educated experience, not to leave out the simple love for music.

Antokoletz also writes, "In traditional tonal music, composers worked according to a system in which the octave was divided into unequal parts."(7) It seems odd that most of tonal music is based off of an unequal fifth interval of the octave, and not the equal sixth division of twelve notes. Serving as the harmonic root function of tonal music and its major and minor triadic systems the aural perception of unequal divisions of the octave creates pleasing sound when in fact the sixth interval of twelve notes, or the equal division of twelve notes is one of atonal or unusual sound. In fact of all of the harmonic theories in position for tonal music, Bartók has figured the opposite theory in his equal subdivisions of the octave. In addition, he places them into complex interval cycles, Antokoletz calls Interval Class, that is a system of complementary interval cycles and is key to Bartók's thematic schemes.It entails the opposite theory to tonality and provides more than enough material for composition. (See Previous Blogs for Interval Cycles).

It is not impossible to understand how any other form other than post war integral serialism could influence Belá Bartók. His management of row fragments and other uses of dodecaphonics, combined with theories of late nineteenth century romanticism along with his middle-eastern roots and those of ancient times has proliferated a kind of fortspinnung effect influencing today's twenty-first century composers. And it's entirely possible that the theories of the string quartets challenged new music on a global level in a time when Bel Canto still remained in Italy, the Wagnerian and Mahler influence was still popular in Germany, and the new Russian Schools looked toward methods to top what Bartók had already done back in the United States.

Later, still more to come...