Heritage of music. Bla Bartk - Essay Example

? Bela Bartok Bela Bartok’s amazing accomplishments are in part due to the biographical elements of his life, as well as to his own creative energy. The biographical elements include the times and places of his growth and development, as well as the people who influenced him. His individual creativity can only be attributed to that unexplainable factor that accounts for artistic genius. Together these elements combined to make one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century. Bela Bartok was born in the town of Nagyszentimiklos in Hungary in 1881 (Sadie and Tyrrell 132). Being a product of Eastern Europe at this time in history meant that he would experience a lot of political and economic instability during his life. Adding to this social and political insecurity, the death of his father in 1881 caused his mother to move to what became the Ukraine and then Slovakia (Raeburn and Kendall 248). The changing borders of these Eastern European countries together with the physical and economic unsteadiness of his family kept Bartok’s world in flux as he was growing up. It must have seemed as though the ground continued to move beneath him. It is possible that this lack of stability could have contributed to his development as an artist, that the music inside of him was a constant that was not present in his outside world. Although the unpredictable circumstances of his childhood may have been a factor in Bartok’s artistic development, his early musical accomplishments indicate that he must have had innate talent as well. Also, his mother gave piano lessons, so he grew up listening to her teach and play. At the age of eleven he gave his first public performance, which included some original compositions. During his teen years, Bartok continued to advance in his performance level and began composing chamber music, a skill he learned by reading musical scores. At the age of eighteen, he entered the Budapest Academy of Music, where he became influenced by other composers and their musical styles. He studied piano with teacher who was a student of Franz Liszt, from whom he drew what Taruskin called a “self-conscious image” (373). Perhaps this meant that he was developing a style which was his and his alone. Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” inspired him to think outside the borders of conventional music, and pieces by Debussy introduced him to the tone poem (Taruskin 349). This combination led to his first major work, Kossuth, which was composed in 1903 and performed in 1904. The central figure of this symphonic poem is Lajos Kossuth, who was a hero in the Hungarian revolution. Embodying Bartok’s youthful patriotism, Kossuth gained even more popularity because of the political tension between Hungary and Austria at that time. Hungarians in the German army were demanding the same representation among the commanding ranks and wanted the Hungarian language to be spoken and recognized as equal to German (Taruskin 373). Kossuth was “a kind of narrative of the 1848-1849 revolution, in which the Austrians are represented by a grotesque distortion of Haydn’s famous imperial anthem (‘Gott, erhalte Franz den Kaiser’), and Kossuth (by extension, the Hungarians) by a melody in the noblest magyar nota style” (Taruski 374), magyar nota meaning Old Hungarian song. Also while at the Academy, at about the same time that he discovered Strauss’s and Debussy’s music and adapted the genre and style of the tone poem to his own innovative compositions, Bartok met the composer Zoltan Kodaly, with whom he became a lifelong friend. Kodaly’s influence on Bartok was to introduce him to the music of the common people. Together they travelled the countryside collecting Slovak songs from the local peasants. These activities along with the popularity of Kossuth led him to become somewhat of a national hero, and his music came to represent what was Hungarian. According to Taruskin, “‘haughty accompanying rhythms,” “dotted pairs on every downbeat,” “use of raised fourth degree,” and “‘crowded’ upbeats” (374) were some of the specific features of Bartok’s music which became standard Hungarian characteristics. Thus, by the time he was twenty-five years old, Bartok changed from being influenced to being influential. Hungarian nationalism was of central importance in Bartok’s musical development because up until his time, traditional sounds and nationalism were synonymous (Taruskin 375). Although he was very nationalistic, he was also a young modernist and wanted to explore his art with new sounds, which might veer away from the traditional. It was like the age-old argument between the establishment and the young, between classical and popular music. Politically he was in favor of socialism rather than individualism, but still he wanted to exercise his creativity. Bartok was unique in his ability to blend traditional sounds and folk songs with what he called patterns of nature (Taruskin 379), which resulted in a new identity for Hungarian music. Associating his music with nature was a way of easing its modern characteristics into an acceptable view by the established social and political powers that might otherwise reject too much originality. During the middle period of Bartok’s life, from approximately 1908 until the beginning of World War II, he composed his six string quartets. Characteristic of this apex of his career was continued development of the maximalist techniques for which he was known. In all aspects of art, maximalism (obviously the opposite of minimalism) is typified by elaborate detail, and in Bartok’s case a combination of traditional Hungarian sounds and his own original patterns and techniques. One of these innovations was the “bridge form” which was symmetrical in shape. Just like a palindrome, it could be read the same way both forwards and backwards. A new technique for stringed instruments still known today as the “Bartok pizz” (Taruskin 402) was a pizzicato that was played with the left hand by snapping the string against the fingerboard with the fingering hand rather than the bow hand. Even though Bartok remained very nationalistic throughout his life, he continued to be inventive in form and technique. World War II became a major turning point in Bartok’s career, one that eventually took him away from his beloved Hungary. As Nazi Germany gained more and more strength in Europe in the late 1930s, he began to think about leaving the country and started sending his compositions abroad. Soon after his mother died in 1939, he went on tour in the United States, and in 1940 he moved to New York. His concerts were not as well received as he had hoped they would be, and his health was failing. In 1944 he was diagnosed with leukemia, and he died in 1945. In contrast with his popularity during his younger life in Hungary, only a handful of people attended his funeral in America. Bela Bartok lived through two world wars, and his travels took him through various countries in Eastern Europe as well as America. His versatility as a composer and musician was the result not only of his surroundings, circumstances of history, and the people in his life but also of the innate genius of his creativity. As he added his genius to the influences in his life, the combination became an influence on those musicians who followed after him. In this way the contributions of a single artist can start from being part of a small country’s history and lead to having a major impact on the cultural growth of the world. Works Cited Raeburn, Michael, and Alan Kendall, eds. Heritage of Music. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford UP,1989. Print. Sadie, Stanley, and John Tyrrell, eds. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Vol. 2. London: Macmillan, 2001. Print. Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Read More