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Bartók's Notation: Tonality and Modality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Malcolm Gillies
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Extract

Everyone knows that Bartók's compositions were strongly influenced by his work with folk music. For over 70 years commentators have repeated the fact in one form or another. Bartok himself noted shortly before his death: ‘It is almost a truism that contemporary art music in Hungary has Eastern European folk music as its basis. However, there is much misunderstanding and misinterpretation with reference to the relation between our higher art music and our rural music’. That ‘misunderstanding and misinterpretation’ was not entirely the fault of scholars and critics. Bartók's numerous essays on the subject, written between 1911 and 1944, all too often provide the reader with generalities. Where he is specific it is most usually about thematic, or occasionally harmonic, derivations from folk sources. With the exception of portions of the ‘Harvard Lectures’ (1943), however, Bartók avoids any sustained account of how folk music influenced the modal and tonal structures of his compositions. Above all, he never explains the principles behind his characteristic pitch notations, particularly those double sharps and double flats so frequently found in his scores.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 145 , June 1983 , pp. 4 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

Notes

1 ‘Hungarian Music’ (June 1944) in Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Suchoff, Benjamin (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976) p. 393Google Scholar.

2 ibid. pp. 301–396.

3 ibid. pp. 361–383.

4 Access to the sketches (NYBA 81FSSI pp. 37–64) and permission to reproduce Facsimile (p. 41) kindly granted by Dr. Benjamin Suchoff, Successor-Trustee of the Estate of Béla Bartók. Apart from the two scales (staves 1 and 2) and an incomplete version of the fugue subject (stave 10), the page shows material relating to bars 19–37 of the published score of the second movement.

5 All but the last-named of these collections are available in the New York Bartók Archive Studies in Musicology series.

6 The various stages in Bartók's process of composition, and the extant materials, are outlined in László Somfai, ‘Manuscript versus Urtext: the Primary Sources of Bartók's Works', Studia Musicologica 23 (1981): 17–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 ‘Hungarian Music’ (June 1944) in Bartók, Bela, op. cit., p. 395Google Scholar.

8 ‘Harvard Lectures’ (February 1943), ibid. pp. 377–381.

9 Bartók, Béla and Lord, Albert B., Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951) pp. 62–63Google Scholar. Bartok's Preface is dated February 1943, although the text was not finalized until mid-December 1944. The volume is reproduced as part of Yugoslav Folk Music, ed. Suchoff, Benjamin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

10 ibid. p. 64. Bartók adopted Ilmari Krohn's system of folk music notation which transposed tunes to a uniform tonusfinalis of G.

11 ‘Harvard Lectures’ in Bartók, Béla, op. cit., p. 381Google Scholar.

12 ibid. p. 383.

13 Bartók, Béla and Lord, Albert B., op. cit., pp. 64–65Google Scholar.

14 See NYBA 81FSS1 p. 40 in particular.

15 Lenoir, Yves, ‘Contributions à I'étude de la Sonate pour Violon Solo de Béla Bartók’, Studia Musicologica 23 (1981): 209–260Google Scholar. The discussion of the fugue subject is on p. 243.

16 Bartók, Béla and Lord, Albert B., op. cit., p. 64Google Scholar.

17 Bartók, Béla, op. cit., p. 459Google Scholar.

18 See Gillies, Malcolm, ‘Bartók's Last Works: A Theory of Tonality and Modality’, Musicology 7 (1982): 120–130Google Scholar.