Composition 3

MUH 2026

Bartók String Quartets 3 and 4

Grove article on Bartok (APU Campus only).

BBC Radio 3 Discovering Music Programmes on Bartok

Background

Bartók's String Quartets are generally recognised to be equivalent in stature in the 20th century to Beethoven's. Although less numerous, they span a significant portion of the composer's life and styles.

The third quartet is the shortest and in many respects the most 'modern' and revolutionary, although this is due to an increased use of folk material. At the same time there is a developing interest in structural formality - the use of canonic material and fugal techniques.

Folk Music

Bartók spent some time studying and collecting examples of the folk music of Hungary and was clearly highly influenced by this at a fundamental level.

During the first half of the 1920s Bartók's compositional output slackened, not least because of his intense ethnomusicological work. Already in an essay of January 1918 he had articulated his old-new stylistic distinction in Hungarian folk music; by 1921 Kodály and Bartók had finalized a modest collection of Hungarian folksongs from Transylvania, published two years later; in 1924 Bartók's transcription and analysis of over 320 Hungarian songs was unveiled in his A magyar népdal. It appeared in German the following year, and in 1931 in English with the title Hungarian Folk Music. Bartók was also engaged during 1921-3 in compiling a two-volume study of some 1,800 Slovak peasant melodies, which he sent for publication in Czechoslovakia. (A third Slovak volume was completed in 1928, although all three remained unpublished during Bartók's lifetime.) He then immediately moved to prepare a volume of Romanian Christmas songs, which occupied much of his time from late 1923 until April 1926. (After many trials, only the musical part of this study appeared in a self-funded edition in 1935.) Grove

Unlike the Briton Cecil Sharp, there was no desire to alter the music, merely to notate it. In many ways, there is a conscious attempt to display it in all its roughness and vigour; when folk-influenced material appears in the quartets it is usually in a highly unsentimental atmosphere.

The greatest legacy of Bartók's folk-music studies, however, undoubtedly lies in his own compositions. It was exactly those ethnomusicological fascinations with musical detail and subtle observations of variant forms (which have led to periodic accusations from latter-day ethnomusicologists that he was not 'seeing the wood for the trees') which fed his greatest creative strengths. What contemporaries such as Schoenberg or Stravinsky could not well appreciate was that Bartók's folk-music studies provided him with a limitless arsenal for creative transformation. Grove

Compare other, earlier, nationalists, such as Russians like Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky etc.

Stravinsky is more comparable, although Bartok was generally less 'fashionable': Stravinsky's use of folk material was generally intended to fulfil a desire for this material on behalf of the fashionable turn of the century and mid-war decadence in France. In this sense Bartok in his quartets is closer to Beethoven who occasionally used folk material but very much made it his own. Stravinsky had a tendency to paraphrase.

Structure

Bartok had little interest in serialism, although he was ahead of his time in his speculative ideas about more esoteric and less intrusive devices such as the Golden Section - notably used in Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste.

Question: In what way is the 3rd quartet a piece in itself rather than, for instance, the first movement of an larger, unfinished work?

Having updated his piano repertory Bartók turned his attention in 1927-8 to chamber music, starting with the Third String Quartet (bb93), composed during the summer of 1927. In this quartet he attained the ultimate compression of his formal, pitch and rhythmic materials. Adorno (1929) wrote: "What is decisive is the formative power of the work; the iron concentration, the wholly original tectonics". The traditional four movements are here fused into a single movement of about 17 minutes' duration. A new colouristic approach to string sonority is displayed, partly inspired by Berg's Lyrische Suite, which Bartók had recently heard. The score bristles with 'special effects' - glissando, pizzicato, col legno, sul tasto, ponticello, martellato, muted passages, the use of exaggerating vibrato, strumming, and their combinations all of which give the piece its startling piquancy. In October 1928 it was awarded joint first prize, with Casella's Serenata, in a competition of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, where it was given its first performance on 30 December of the same year.
Meanwhile, during the summer of 1928, Bartók had composed his Fourth String Quartet bb95. While taking over the expanded palette of string sonorities of no.3, the Fourth is formally very different. Originally conceived in only four movements, Bartók then added another (the published fourth movement) to provide a symmetrical five-movement structure. The slow, third movement, in a style reminiscent of The Night's Music from Out of Doors, is the work's kernel. The second movement's tight thematic material is reflected, in more open guise, in the fourth, entirely pizzicato movement. The first movement's themes are also loosely mirrored in the finale, which ends with a coda that borrows liberally from the first movement's conclusion. Such symmetrical thinking about form had been evident in Bartók's works since the 1910s, but had never been expressed by him as clearly, either in the music or in his own analysis. The pitch relations of the quartet operate at a high level of abstraction, with much interplay between contracted and expanded expressions of short cells, yet in rhythm certain folk models are more apparent. In the first movement, for instance, Bulgarian-type irregular rhythms are used; the third movement involves rhythmic elements of both 'old' Hungarian and Romanian hora lunga precedent.
Grove

Bartók Techniques

Typical Bartók Techniques include:

  • The use of folk materials and ideas (see above). This is difficult to fully appreciate away from his native country, especially when the differences between British and Hungarian folk musics seem so substantial.
  • The use of bitonal ostinati
  • The use of bitonality itself.
  • The use of a primarily tonal backdrop against which is played a contradictory, chromatic melody.
  • The use of rhythmic extremes within a melody, especially slow and expressive ones (Quartet 4, third movement)
  • The use of simple rhythmic patterns in differing combinations, creating more complex and hard to predict passages.
  • 'Snap' pizzicato - pizzicato where the string is pulled so far back that when released it 'snaps' against the neck of the instrument.




















Composition 3

MUH 2026

Bartók String Quartets 3 and 4

Grove article on Bartok (APU Campus only).

BBC Radio 3 Discovering Music Programmes on Bartok

Background

Bartók's String Quartets are generally recognised to be equivalent in stature in the 20th century to Beethoven's. Although less numerous, they span a significant portion of the composer's life and styles.

The third quartet is the shortest and in many respects the most 'modern' and revolutionary, although this is due to an increased use of folk material. At the same time there is a developing interest in structural formality - the use of canonic material and fugal techniques.

Folk Music

Bartók spent some time studying and collecting examples of the folk music of Hungary and was clearly highly influenced by this at a fundamental level.

During the first half of the 1920s Bartók's compositional output slackened, not least because of his intense ethnomusicological work. Already in an essay of January 1918 he had articulated his old-new stylistic distinction in Hungarian folk music; by 1921 Kodály and Bartók had finalized a modest collection of Hungarian folksongs from Transylvania, published two years later; in 1924 Bartók's transcription and analysis of over 320 Hungarian songs was unveiled in his A magyar népdal. It appeared in German the following year, and in 1931 in English with the title Hungarian Folk Music. Bartók was also engaged during 1921-3 in compiling a two-volume study of some 1,800 Slovak peasant melodies, which he sent for publication in Czechoslovakia. (A third Slovak volume was completed in 1928, although all three remained unpublished during Bartók's lifetime.) He then immediately moved to prepare a volume of Romanian Christmas songs, which occupied much of his time from late 1923 until April 1926. (After many trials, only the musical part of this study appeared in a self-funded edition in 1935.) Grove

Unlike the Briton Cecil Sharp, there was no desire to alter the music, merely to notate it. In many ways, there is a conscious attempt to display it in all its roughness and vigour; when folk-influenced material appears in the quartets it is usually in a highly unsentimental atmosphere.

The greatest legacy of Bartók's folk-music studies, however, undoubtedly lies in his own compositions. It was exactly those ethnomusicological fascinations with musical detail and subtle observations of variant forms (which have led to periodic accusations from latter-day ethnomusicologists that he was not 'seeing the wood for the trees') which fed his greatest creative strengths. What contemporaries such as Schoenberg or Stravinsky could not well appreciate was that Bartók's folk-music studies provided him with a limitless arsenal for creative transformation. Grove

Compare other, earlier, nationalists, such as Russians like Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky etc.

Stravinsky is more comparable, although Bartok was generally less 'fashionable': Stravinsky's use of folk material was generally intended to fulfil a desire for this material on behalf of the fashionable turn of the century and mid-war decadence in France. In this sense Bartok in his quartets is closer to Beethoven who occasionally used folk material but very much made it his own. Stravinsky had a tendency to paraphrase.

Structure

Bartok had little interest in serialism, although he was ahead of his time in his speculative ideas about more esoteric and less intrusive devices such as the Golden Section - notably used in Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste.

Question: In what way is the 3rd quartet a piece in itself rather than, for instance, the first movement of an larger, unfinished work?

Having updated his piano repertory Bartók turned his attention in 1927-8 to chamber music, starting with the Third String Quartet (bb93), composed during the summer of 1927. In this quartet he attained the ultimate compression of his formal, pitch and rhythmic materials. Adorno (1929) wrote: "What is decisive is the formative power of the work; the iron concentration, the wholly original tectonics". The traditional four movements are here fused into a single movement of about 17 minutes' duration. A new colouristic approach to string sonority is displayed, partly inspired by Berg's Lyrische Suite, which Bartók had recently heard. The score bristles with 'special effects' - glissando, pizzicato, col legno, sul tasto, ponticello, martellato, muted passages, the use of exaggerating vibrato, strumming, and their combinations all of which give the piece its startling piquancy. In October 1928 it was awarded joint first prize, with Casella's Serenata, in a competition of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, where it was given its first performance on 30 December of the same year.
Meanwhile, during the summer of 1928, Bartók had composed his Fourth String Quartet bb95. While taking over the expanded palette of string sonorities of no.3, the Fourth is formally very different. Originally conceived in only four movements, Bartók then added another (the published fourth movement) to provide a symmetrical five-movement structure. The slow, third movement, in a style reminiscent of The Night's Music from Out of Doors, is the work's kernel. The second movement's tight thematic material is reflected, in more open guise, in the fourth, entirely pizzicato movement. The first movement's themes are also loosely mirrored in the finale, which ends with a coda that borrows liberally from the first movement's conclusion. Such symmetrical thinking about form had been evident in Bartók's works since the 1910s, but had never been expressed by him as clearly, either in the music or in his own analysis. The pitch relations of the quartet operate at a high level of abstraction, with much interplay between contracted and expanded expressions of short cells, yet in rhythm certain folk models are more apparent. In the first movement, for instance, Bulgarian-type irregular rhythms are used; the third movement involves rhythmic elements of both 'old' Hungarian and Romanian hora lunga precedent.
Grove

Bartók Techniques

Typical Bartók Techniques include: