2 - Background
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
Summary
‘In the name of Nature, Art and Science …’
Béla Bartók invoked his personal trinity in 1907, at the age of twenty-six, in a letter to his friend the violinist Stefi Geyer, and for the rest of his life devoted himself to its veneration with a commitment and conviction that matched the intensity of his early rejection of conventional religious belief. For Bartók, the music of the uneducated rural peasantry which he began studying seriously in 1905 was as much a manifestation of nature as the butterflies, insects and alpine flowers he collected:
Peasant music, in the strict sense of the word, must be regarded as a natural phenomenon; the forms in which it manifests itself are due to the instinctive transforming power of a community entirely devoid of erudition. It is just as much a natural phenomenon as, for instance, the various manifestations of Nature in fauna and flora. Correspondingly it has in its individual parts an absolute artistic perfection, a perfection in miniature forms which – one might say – is equal to the perfection of a musical masterpiece of the largest proportions. It is the classical model of how to express an idea musically in the most concise form, with the greatest simplicity of means, with freshness and life, briefly yet completely and properly proportioned.
There is a strange inverse relationship between Bartók's construct of the innately artistic peasantry which produces melodies that are models of perfection (though individual peasants are not to be credited with the composition of songs or instrumental music, but rather with their modification and variation), and Heinrich Schenker's concept of the unique, divinely inspired improvising genius who ‘composes out’ the fundamental structure, which is itself derived from nature.
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- Information
- Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra , pp. 3 - 15Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996