But Hungarian/Gypsy folk music is folk music as you’ve never heard it – completely out of place with hippies in an American coffeeshop. To the average American who is not exactly seventy-two, folk music seems like a drudge. On the second night, a rank-and-file violinist in the orchestra named Istvan Kadar, sporting a mustache straight out of the fourteenth century, would approach the front with a violist and a bassist to play folk songs Bartok based a number of his compositions upon in a style ‘as Bartok might have heard them.’ A children’s choir from rural Hungary on the first night, singing antiphonal music that seems like a distant cousin to choral music from France and Flanders in the thirteenth century (only more fun). It was this sort of folk music which we heard in the first half of each concert. Not so Bartok, and if you’d never heard Eastern European folk music, you’d think Bartok invented his own tonality. Stravinsky’s music is full of ‘intentional wrong notes’ and chords, but it usually operates by a harmonic framework Bach would recognize. Bartok reaches back to a prehistory so ancient that we can only speculate its essence, and updates it into a future so distant that we have barely begun to speculate its properties. He does not, as Stravinsky does, reach back into ancient history and update it for the present. This is the essence of Bartok, simultaneously modern and ancient.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |