Bartókiana - Abstracts
“FROM
THE WELLSPRING TO THE OCEAN:”
BÉLA BARTÓK’S MUSICOLOGICAL LEGACY
IN TODAY’S WORLD
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
June 3-4, 2006
Rethinking Bartók’s Boundaries
By Damjana Bratuž
It was in the early 1960s during my studies at Indiana
University that I first came across Bartók’s
statement regarding Slovenian folk music, in which
he dismissed it as representing only an example of “total
Germanization” (La Musique Populaire des
Hongrois et des peoples Voisins, 1937). Ethnically
a Slovene, I had barely learned children’s songs
in my mother tongue - in a territory that for centuries
had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and became
part of Italy in 1918 - when the folly of the fascist
pursuit of ‘linguistic purity’ suppressed
the cultural expression of all minority groups, and
led to the 1938 ‘racial purity’ laws and
to heir consequences.
The re-establishment of the Slovenian language and
folksong after World War II in that North-Eastern corner
of Italy put me again in touch with a mostly choral
tradition in which indeed the Germanic symmetry of
melodic and rhythmic construction, and Germanic harmonic
movements were apparent. In 1948 I had the opportunity
to meet folklorist and conductor France Marolt and
became aware of the existence of a Folklore Institute
he founded in Ljubljana and of its collections of Slovenian
traditional music.
Marolt’s ethnological studies began to be published
in 1935. While Bartók, had he known them, may
perhaps have found in them only a confirmation of ‘Germanization,’ it
is regrettable that he was not aware of the research
that had been carried out already in the 19 th century
in the Eastern region of Rezija/Resia in Italy, and
that in the Southern region of Bela Krajina bordering
with Croatia folk music had been recorded already in
1912. Together with Prekmurje, bordering with Hungary,
these regions had preserved ancient songs and instruments
of a totally non-Germanic character.
During his writing of The Folk Music of Hungary
and of the Neighbouring Peoples Bartók
corresponded with Croatian folklorist Vinko Žganec.
In a letter to him (October 27 th, 1934) where he
discusses the ‘interactions’ of people
and the ensuing fecund intermingling of their folk
music styles, he also mentions the Slovenes, whose “folk
music has [instead] been Germanized.” (Béla
Bartók Letters, 1971)
In Trieste, during the post-war years one could enjoy
the performances of visiting folk ensembles from Croatia,
Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia. The timbres and performing
styles of the various shepherd’s pipes (frula),
bagpipes, and drums, and the intricacies and asymmetries
of the dance rhythms revealed a totally different musical
heritage from the Slovenian one.
I owed to those experiences the ability to distinguish
in Bartók’s piano music the particular
original timbres of folk instruments, and at Indiana
University my discriminating ear so intrigued professor
Walter Robert, who was conducting the doctoral seminar
on Contemporary Piano Literature, that he encouraged
me to investigate further the relationship of Bartók’s
writing to his folk sources.
The Indiana UniversityArchives of Folk and Primitive
Music had been founded in 1948 by George Herzog,
the great scholar, mentor and collaborator of Bartók,
and there I discovered his transcriptions and tapes
of Bartók’s peasant collections. This
first encounter led to the completion of my doctoral
document, The Folk Element in the Piano Music
ofBéla Bartók (1967).
In 1968 Zmaga Kumer’s publication Das Slovenishe
Volkslied in seiner Manningfaltigkeit came into
my hands. Her description and analysis of folksongs
collected in bordering regions and the revelation
of the existence of ancient Slavic patterns pre-dating
the Germanic influence made me wish, since then,
to “respond to Bartók” in a way,
and to call attention to a hitherto unknown world
which he would have certainly found worthy and congenial.
In this early essay Kumer spoke of ballads with their
typical trochaic seven-syllable construction, of
the art of funeral laments, of winter-solstice songs,
of two-voiced fourths, and seconds, intervals.
A bilingual volume [Slovenian/Italian] by Trieste
composer, slavist, dialectologist, Pavle Merkú,
appeared in 1976. There are Bartókian echoes
in Le Tradizioni Popolari degli Sloveni in Italia,
Merkú having traveled between 1965-1974 to remote
villages in the North-Eastern Rezija/Resia region,
collecting, recording, and transcribing the remnants
of an ancient and disappearing Slavic heritage. The
material of both texts and tunes is organized according
to genres - calendar songs, life cycles and religious
songs, fairy-tales, games, etc. – and the volume
contains indexes and maps.
This remarkable work has been reissued in 2005 with
the addition of a CD. I would like Bartók to
know…. that one can hear the recorded timbre
of unique folk instruments, and that among the songs,
one, “Tam dolj tece voda Rajna” (Down there
flows the river Rhine), goes back seventeen generations
to the times of the traditional pilgrimage from Slovenia
to Aachen that was undertaken every seven years:
“…my two sources did not even know
where was this water to which this lovely melody
referred to” said Merkú in a recent
interview: “…in the collective memory
only a vague idea had remained of a large and slow
river in far-away German lands.”
Equipment needed: Power Point Presentation
A large screen
A CD player if necessary
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