Bartók and Folk Music Ferenc Sebő

The Program for a National Culture of Music

The grandiose, Romantic Movement to establish a national culture of music in Hungary originated from an ideal shared by a generation of composers born in the first third of the nineteenth century (notably Franz Liszt, Ferenc Erkel, and Mihály Mosonyi). Although the suppression of both the 1848–49 revolution and the war of independence fought against the Habsburgs set this movement back, significant results were achieved by the end of the nineteenth century thanks to the economic upswing that followed the compromise of 1867. In order to raise Hungarian musical education to European standards, important musical institutions were established (such as the Music Academy in 1875 and the Opera House in 1884). These institutions benefited from the collaboration of well-educated musicians, most of whom came from abroad, and it was with their help that a new school, based largely on the German musical tradition, became the cornerstone of later musical development in Hungary.

The sudden economic growth of this period also brought certain social contradictions to the fore, as the country, with its traditional feudal-agricultural social structure, was caught somewhat unprepared by the whirlwind of bourgeois capitalist development. The rather small circle of classical musicians, who had quickly risen to European standards, lost touch with the culture of the common people and communication between the two groups became almost impossible.

In terms of music, the realm of popular music remained the preserve of those who wished to keep often-cited “national traditions” alive. The needs of the general public, with its unsophisticated taste in music, were satisfied by practically illiterate, non-professional composers whose occasional works (which are now often referred to as folk songs), were performed by archaic-sounding gypsy bands. In Bartók’s words:

The role of this popular art music is to furnish entertainment and to satisfy the musical needs of those whose artistic sensibilities are of a low order. This phenomenon is but a variant of the types of music that fulfil the same function in Western European countries; of the song hits, operetta airs, and other products of light music as performed by salon orchestras in restaurants and places of entertainment. (1931) [Cigányzene? Magyar zene? (Gypsy music? Hungarian music?) Suchoff 1976: 206]

The folk melodies properly so called are often confused with the dilettante semipopular melodies. The latter are composed mainly by dilettante musicians who have a certain musical culture generally imported from the city; therefore, in the melodies of their invention, they blend certain Western commonplaces with certain exotic peculiarities of their own folk music. Consequently, even if these melodies preserve some faint exotic traces, they are too vulgar to have any intrinsic value. (1921) [A magyar népzene (The Hungarian folk music.) Suchoff 1976: 59]

As we all know, phrases taken from art music that are used in popular music quickly become clichéd. However, the reason that they are at the same time indispensable elements of popular music is exactly that they are “broken-in” and thus well known to the ears of the general audience. This is why the national movement could rely on them. It took advantage of the wide popularity of “mass songs”, even if they were historically inaccurate, to forge the growing numbers of their followers into a spiritually unified community. As a consequence, the majority of Hungarians considered this popular art of music to be “Hungarian music”, and in their political enthusiasm they assigned it a much higher value than it actually deserved. At the same time they felt uneasy about classical music, the appreciation of which required some musical education. It was obvious that the “educated Hungarian middle classes” with their underdeveloped taste in music, did not support innovation, and were easily satisfied by entertaining music of inferior quality. Therefore, composers brooding over the reform of the Hungarian musical vernacular had to look for a firmer footing if they wished to build upon national traditions. The grand plan for the establishment of Hungarian music gradually appeared more and more implausible:

It was the time of a new national movement in Hungary, which also took hold of art and music. In music, too, the aim was set to create something specifically Hungarian. When this movement reached me, it drew my attention to studying Hungarian folk music, or, to be more exact, what at that time was considered Hungarian folk music. (1923) [Önéletrajz (Autobiography) Suchoff 1976: 409]

The enthusiastic national feeling which arose in the wake of the millenary celebrations of 1896, commemorating the thousand-year anniversary of the establishment of the country, shook up Hungarian society. The study of the history of Hungarian cultural traditions quickly became a national priority. The works of old authors were republished and re-read, and nationalistic songs from the period of the anti-Habsburg war of independence led by Ferenc Rákóczi (1703-11) began to inspire the people again. During this period Béla Bartók wore typical Hungarian attire. It was in this atmosphere that he composed his symphonic piece for a full orchestra called Kossuth, which recounts Hungary’s last heroic drive for independence in 1848. Yet this “characteristically Hungarian” music, apart from revealing the influences of Strauss and Liszt, largely exhausted the potential of his sources, and by the time the general public began to grow fond of Bartók’s deployment of well-known formulas (in 1904 the first performance of the Kossuth Symphony in Budapest achieved great success), the composer himself had grown dissatisfied with the technique. His dissatisfaction was fed by two feelings. On the one hand, he began to find the exaggerations of Post-Romanticism increasingly unbearable, and on the other, he perceived any association with the latest art music written in a Hungarian folk-style as a dead end: “there is no other solution than a complete break with the nineteenth century.” (1931) [A parasztzene hatása az újabb magyar műzenére (The influence of peasant music on modern music) Suchoff 1976: 340]

 The Discovery of “Early Music”

 Thus a new source of inspiration was needed that was free from sentimentalism and banality, one which through its great expressiveness, simplicity, and at the same time variety, could become an appropriate starting point for a renaissance in music. To use a modern expression, we could say that Bartók, well ahead of contemporary historical movements, “discovered early music”, that is to say he re-discovered the musical tastes of the pre-Romantic period. Several characteristics of early music were perceived as novelties in the contemporary sentimental environment. One of these, for example, was the total lack of dynamics. To pre-Romantic musical ears the increasing and sustaining of tension was expressed through monotony and repetition. It is therefore no wonder that we find no dynamic marks in Bartók’s transcriptions. It is only in adaptations of art music that he uses the term forte to indicate the powerful intonation required, as is shown in illustration no. 2. According to Adorno, the constant tones and unbroken movement, which are also basic requirements of early music, became one of the characteristics of Bartók’s music (Adorno 1998: 346).

It is an interesting contradiction of the Romantic Movement that it was responsible for both the popular revival and the complete transformation of earlier pieces of music—it reshaped the true essence of such pieces into its own image, making the original forms unrecognizable through romantic and academic styles of performance. Because of this, Bartók discovered that the intellectually revitalizing message of early music could only be found in the oldstyle folk music still alive among the peasantry. One might ask why it was the peasantry that played such an important role in the preservation of folk traditions. The main reason lies in the series of wars and shifts of power in Hungary that began in the sixteenth century: social order was so greatly disrupted that almost no other social class managed to preserve its continuity unbroken. The cultural traditions of historical Hungary, which used to be one of the dominant countries of medieval Europe, only survived into the twentieth century among the peasantry. So-called “peasant” (or “rural”) music is therefore a remnant of the former, common culture of an entire nation, and the recognition of this fact was of crucial importance for Hungarian intellectuals at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of them (such as Zoltán Kodály, who had a great influence on Bartók) thought that a modern middle-class culture in Hungary could only be established by getting back to these roots. Bartók’s initial conservative aristocratic nationalism was soon replaced by a new compassion: a (no less romantic) love for the peasantry, with strong “anti-capitalist” feelings.

Our reverence for the Eastern strictly rural music was, so to speak, a new musico-religious faith. We felt that this rural music, in those pieces which are intact, attained an unsurpassable degree of musical perfection and beauty, to be found nowhere else except in the great works of the classics. (1944) [Magyar zene (Hungarian music) Suchoff 1976: 393]

However, in contrast to many “folk-admirers”, Bartók wanted to approach the folk according to a scholarly plan, as a “musical sociographer”. He was interested in reality, and this saved him from falling into the trap of racist, traditionalist nationalism. Throughout his life, Béla Bartók always approached the objects of his research in a thoroughly meticulous and consistent manner. If he acquired new information during his research, he never hesitated to modify his initial theories. As his research material expanded, he gradually developed increasingly accurate and resolute methods of inquiry.

So greatly did the newly discovered world of the past enthrall those who came in contact with it Ferenc Sebő (including Bartók himself), that their enthusiasm could only be compared to that of Renaissance artists who re-evaluated classical values, placing them on a pedestal and considering their spirit to be the catalyst of inspiration for every new work of art. It might seem an odd contradiction that in denying the outworn language of the present, artistic movements that strive toward the establishment of the “new” above all turn to the intellectual heritage of an earlier period. However, reflection on the past actually supports the struggle of the present, just as when in the Renaissance the bourgeois middle class sought to legitimize its drive to power by drawing upon the classical values of Antiquity.

For an artist it is not only right to have his roots in the art of some former times, it is a necessity. Well, in our case it is peasant music which holds our roots. (1931) [A népzene jelentőségéről (On the significance of Hungarian folk music). Suchoff 1976: 345]

Bartók’s desire to put “real” folk music on a pedestal is well documented in his writings. Even though the origins of such music remain obscure due to contact with various other influences (for example, art music and other kinds of folk music), the supposedly undisturbed processes of “sedimentation and cleansing” which take place in the closed interior world of the community nevertheless transform it into a “natural phenomenon”. As a collective artistic phenomenon of “homogenous style”, it gained an almost mythical role:

It offers something absolutely uncommon, in perfect shape, and it exhibits not the slightest tinge of vulgar phraseology. It has an especially refreshing effect on the Western European ear, because of the complete lack of a melody line pointing to the tonic-dominant combination. (After all, we meet this combination in other Eastern European peasant music, too.) (1920) [Magyar parasztzene (Hungarian peasant music). Suchoff 1976: 304]

Although the real value of peasant music lies in the qualities that it has retained from ancient times (as measured by its ties to tradition), it also harbors the potential to develop new variants, types, and even new styles. This creativity effectively inspires new music.

It was not easy to maintain such ideas as the political events of the 1930s transformed traditions, the concept of ethnic character, and folk music itself into demonic tools of mass manipulation, as the “universal appeal” card was played against high art. Nevertheless, Bartók continued on his own path, even though he knew that certain avant-garde circles (for example, those of Adorno, Schönberg, Westphal, and Jemnitz) would automatically reject every form of folklorism (Ujfalussy 1970: 309). To counter charges against folklorism, he referred to the middle class traditions of the pre-Romantic period, citing Shakespeare, Moličre, Händel, and most of all Johann Sebastian Bach, masters of a Classicism engendered by the middle-classes but rooted in folk tradition, masters who always adapted the raw material (e.g. folk music) that society offered them (Tallián 1979: 229).

The confluence of these two ideals foreshadowed the present-day interdependence between the early music movement and the renaissance of instrumental folk music, since it is well-known that folk-music traditions preserved not only ancient melodies but also the “ancient” techniques and performance styles of instrumental music. The precise methods used to perform pre-eighteenth-century music cannot always be reconstructed solely on the basis of contemporary musical treatises, as it is often precisely the common practices in which we are most interested that such treatises fail to record. Today, only the orally transmitted information found in folk music can aid us in this kind of reconstruction. Bartók’s intuitions and unrecorded associations had thus advanced into extremely important territory...

Folk music itself mostly appears in the form of themes in Bartók’s works (just as nature does in an artist’s paintings), as a true-to-life mediator of the spirit and aesthetics of early music, free from banality or sentimentalism. Although he considered authentic methods of performance to be an essential part of peasant music, he translated his musical Bartók and Folk Music quotations into the language of art music. As much as he was interested in the exotic nature of authentic styles of performance (for his 1914 lecture on the Romanian folk music of Hunyad, for example, he invited peasant performers to Budapest), it was obvious that he was thinking and composing in the musical-historical context of traditional European art music (Vikárius 1999: 199). However, he had little opportunity to do otherwise, as contemporary educated musicians were not at all familiar with authentic styles of performance. His struggle with the musicians of the symphonic orchestra in Frankfurt over a few Bulgarian tunes of asymmetrical rhythm, a memorable event which he recorded in 1938 [Az úgynevezett bolgár ritmus (The socalled Bulgarian rhythm). In Szôllôsy 1967: 26] is worth remembering in this context. Indeed, the discovery and widespread attainment of the ancient techniques applied in folk music began only in the early 1970s as one of the objectives of the táncház movement in Hungary. This type of approach is also apparent in the method of musical notation he applied when inserting identifiable folk tunes into his works. If we look at the original, “scholarly” transcriptions of the folk melodies, we notice that almost every audible detail is recorded in the notation, but no more than that which “scholarly terms” can account for. When inserting these melodies into art music, however, he makes use of every bit of information (e.g. the characteristic way of bowing) that he had recorded in his memory, and he transcribes this information in accordance with the musical notation system of traditional performance practices (cf. scores nos. 2 and 3).

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