Béla Bartók
Bartók spent years walking through Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak villages with a phonograph, writing down what people sang. That work is the foundation of his music. The scales he uses are the ones he found there rather than the major and minor of the concert tradition, and the rhythms follow the stresses of spoken Hungarian, which lands the accent on the first syllable.
His forms are usually symmetrical. A five movement work will often be an arch: the first and last movements answer each other, the second and fourth are a lighter pair, and the middle movement is the still centre. Within a movement he builds from small cells that grow, invert and come back compressed.
He also invented a texture that gets called night music: quiet held chords, small bird and insect sounds in the woodwind, a melody that seems to come from a distance. It appears from the 1920s onwards and is easy to recognise once you have heard it.
What to listen for
- The arch. In the five movement works, check whether the fourth movement echoes the second and the fifth answers the first.
- Rhythm that pushes on the first beat of a short figure, then breaks the pattern before it settles.
- Instruments used percussively: strings snapped against the fingerboard, piano treated as a drum, brass in hard blocks.
- The night music passages: almost silence, then isolated sounds scattered across the orchestra.
Source: Béla Bartók