NICOLE V. GAGNÉ

“Intense Purity of Feeling”: Béla Bartók and American Music

Introduction

I’m going to discuss one of Europe’s great early modernists, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, who was born in 1881. His name is perennially cited alongside three other composers, also born in the 1880s: the Russian Igor Stravinsky in ‘82, and the Viennese Anton Webern in ’83 and Alban Berg in ’85 – plus of course their teacher Arnold Schoenberg, also Viennese, born in 1874. Bartók always gets lumped together with them because he is as important and groundbreaking a composer as these four other European masters are. But his musical attitude and methodology and materials, the qualities that made him a master, did not have a lot in common with either Stravinsky or the Second Viennese School – none of whom were very friendly toward or interested in Bartók back then. By the same token, the highly influential French teacher Nadia Boulanger, a champion of Stravinsky and neo-classical music, was not a supporter of Bartók’s either.

Where Bartók did find support, and where you do hear a commonality of attitude and methodology and even materials – and see respect and friendship too – is with the Americans; in particular, the composer/musicians who were known as “ultramodernists” in the 1910s and ‘20s and ‘30s: Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Dane Rudhyar, Nicolas Slonimsky, Ezra Pound.

In this talk, I want to examine Bartók mostly in the context of American music, starting with these early modernists and proceeding to the later American modernists, born mostly in the first decades of the 20th century. I also want to consider Bartók’s connection to jazz and the nature of Bartók’s continued presence in American postmodern music.

I. Early Modernism

We’ll start with Bartók’s American contemporaries, the ultra-modernists. Is anybody here unfamiliar with the term “tone-cluster”? It refers to the sounding of groups of immediately adjacent pitches, building chords of major and minor seconds – secundal harmony. The term “tone-cluster” was coined by the composer/musician Henry Cowell, born here in California, up in Menlo Park in 1897. It’s in his book New Musical Resources, published in 1930 but written mostly in 1919. Cowell first composed his tone-cluster piano music when both he and the 20th century were in their teens, and he kept at it straight through the 1920s. It’s a remarkable body of work for a lot of reasons, not the least being the skill and thoroughness with which he explored the potential of tone-clusters. This music earned Cowell a great deal of press during the ‘20s – not always kind, but still, it was press – and he made several international tours that decade, performing and discussing his music.

Cowell first toured Europe in 1923, and on December 10 he played a concert in London. Béla Bartók was also in London at that time; in fact he was playing a recital on that same night, the 10th, with the violinist Adila Fachiri – she was the musician to whom Bartók had dedicated both of his Violin Sonatas in 1921 and ’22. The soprano Lady Dorothy Mayer had invited Cowell to stay at her London home, which was a big pile, and of course they had a piano, and Cowell started his first morning there by practicing for his recital.

It’s about 7 A.M. and he’s playing these tone-clusters with the flat of his hand and his forearm, building up waves of densities, creating this extraordinary sound, and who on earth comes downstairs in their bathrobe, to see what the hell is going on here? Béla Bartók. Lady Mayer was letting him crash there too, and neither he nor Cowell knew that the other was there. So Bartók watches Cowell and listens to what he’s doing, and he starts to hear it, the methodology and technique of the music, and he becomes very engrossed in it. And that was the beginning of their friendship.

They discussed experiences as touring musicians, and Cowell lamented to Bartók that he had just performed in Paris but no one showed up to hear him – nobody from the music scene, nobody who counted. Bartók found that alarming, and he told Cowell, “Oh, this must be rearranged at once; you must go right back to Paris and I will arrange a concert at which everybody will be there.” So Cowell booked another recital in Paris, and Bartók changed his itinerary to make sure he would get to Paris a day early, and when Cowell gave his concert, who was in the audience? Maurice Ravel, Manuel de Falla, Arthur Honegger, Daris Milhaud, Albert Roussel, also Henry Prunières, the musicologist and founder of the journal La Revue musicale. Bartók had rounded them all up so they could hear this new piano music for themselves.

It was probably not long after this meeting that Bartók wrote Cowell and asked for permission to use tone-clusters in his own music. Cowell of course was flattered and urged him to go ahead, and this technique gets into Bartók’s music around 1926 with two classic scores, both of which Bartók created specifically so he could concertize with them: his Sonata for Piano and his First Piano Concerto. In fact, the Scottish composer/musician Erik Chisholm recalled a meeting with Bartók in 1933, when they discussed the use of tone-clusters in Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto. Chisholm said that Bartók told him, “Not my invention, I’m afraid. I got the idea from a young American composer, Henry Cowell.”

In 1925 Cowell formed the New Music Society, which began giving concerts; the following year Bartók became a member of its non-resident advisory board. Between 1928 and 1933, Bartók’s piano or vocal music was performed in six of the Society’s concerts. In 1926 Cowell was again touring Europe, only this time he came to Budapest, on Bartók’s invitation. “And I was with him every day for eleven days,” Cowell later said, “while he played me nearly every record that he had made of Romanian and Hungarian folk music. I simply spent the day there listening to recordings and talking over these exciting things – modern music, which was still so young in those days.” Cowell had been interested in folk music prior to then, but after this encounter with Bartók his investigations became intensive and extensive, very thorough and methodical, just as he had been with tone-clusters in the teens and ‘20s. Around 1930, ‘31, Cowell applied for a Guggenheim grant to support his study of ethnomusicology, and asked Bartók to write a letter of recommendation – which he did, calling Cowell, “one of the most serious and gifted composers of today.” Cowell got the grant too, and he went on to become one of the great ethnomusicologists of his era – which of course also transformed his own composition, exquisitely, in his last decades especially, the 1950s and ‘60s.

Late in 1927, when Bartók came to the United States for his first American tour, he stayed at the Manhattan apartment of a woman named Blanche Walton. She was the patron of Henry Cowell and the New Music Society. One member of the New Music Society who met Bartók during his stay was the composer/musician Dane Rudhyar. He was born in Paris in 1895 and had just become an American citizen the previous year, 1926, having lived in the States since 1916. Rudhyar was a mystical-minded, visionary composer, inspired by Claude Debussy, Stravinsky, and Alexander Scriabin, interested in densities and atonality; the music he’s best known for is probably his piano scores of the 1920s: Pentagrams Nos. 1-4, Tetragrams Nos. 2-8, and Granites.

In 1982, more than 50 years later, Rudhyar wrote a remarkable book called The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music. It made a special impact upon composers such as Glenn Branca, who were interested in densities and resonances – what Rudhyar called “pleroma” music. In this book Rudhyar recalled his meeting with Bartók: “Béla Bartók gave a great deal of attention to what he called ‘pan-tonality,’ as I can personally testify. In a long, private meeting I had with him […] he spoke at length about a non-exclusivistic type of tonality which could accept the presence of any note, provided the musical piece would have a recognizable tone-center. Bartók did not think of such a tone-center as a fundamental, of which the other notes would be overtones. What he seemed eager to convey as he demonstrated this idea on the piano was that every conceivable note and type of sound should be allowed as long as it could be felt to be part of a musical whole in which a centralizing vibration established the character of the composition.”

You hear pantonal techniques throughout Bartók’s music. He would utilize drones or reiterated tones or ostinati to establish tonal emphases or levels, creating the sensation of a key while avoiding the limitations of tonal harmony. Pantonality offers form and character to a work without inhibiting its chromatic reach or its noise possibilities; it also offers a way to hold things together without relying on a rhythmic pulse. The American composer George Crumb was thinking about this idea when he wrote in 1980, “There seems to be a growing feeling that we must somehow evolve a new kind of tonality. Probably the ideal solution, anticipated, it seems to me, by Bartók, is to combine the possibilities of our chromatic language – which is so rich and expressive in its own right – with a sense of strong tonal focus.”

George Crumb’s teacher was Ross Lee Finney, a wonderful composer who himself had studied with Nadia Boulanger, Alban Berg, and Roger Sessions. As you might expect from that background, Finney had a great gift for both tonal and serial idioms, and he told me that he had a high regard for Bartók and was especially interested in Bartók’s sense of what Finney called “pitch polarity”: balancing chromatic availability with certain tonal structures.

I’ll have more to say about pantonality, but I should just mention here that “pantonal” is not a term you’re liable to hear all that often, and when you do, people may be using it in different ways. Schoenberg hated the word “atonal” – he considered it a misnomer: a music without tones! He preferred using the term “pantonal” to describe music without a tonal center, where all twelve tones were equally important and available; a totally chromatic situation, with none of the pecking orders characteristic of tonal harmony. So sometimes you’ll see the word used that way, as a more sensible and precise synonym for atonality. Other times, however, you’ll see it as Bartók used it: a situation of not just total chromatic but also total aural availability – as Rudhyar said, “every conceivable note and type of sound should be allowed.” That availability is unsustainable within structural tonal harmony or strict serial discourse; but it is readily supported by the tonal focus that a centralizing tone can generate. So of course it made sense for Bartók to compose a Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, even though no one had brought the pitched and the unpitched into chamber music in that way before.

Bartók’s relationship with percussion shows a far greater kinship with Ives, Cowell, and Varèse than it does with the Viennese or even Stravinsky. Les noces from 1923 is probably Stravinsky’s masterpiece: four vocal soloists and mixed chorus, accompanied by four pianos and a percussion ensemble. Stravinsky wanted a really special exotic sound, and he got it. But Les noces was his only work to use percussion so prominently; nothing he did before or after was like that. Now, Bartók may not have written a lot of pieces that emphasized percussion, but the ones that did were hugely influential because they emphasized the equality of the percussion.

Most percussion instruments do not articulate definite, equal-tempered pitches, and so they have been treated in the European concert tradition basically as the idiot children of the orchestra, incapable of articulating Important Ideas, which of course are communicated by pitch relationships. Percussion was reserved mostly for highlighting drama by seasoning what were regarded as the less important parameters of music: rhythm(!), dynamics, and timbre.

This idea was put out to pasture by Charles Ives back in 1915, with a lengthy movement for percussion ensemble in his Universe Symphony; but that music would go unperformed until the 1990s. The French composer Darius Milhaud did very important work with percussion in the teens with his opera Les choéphores and the dance score L’homme et son désir. But it was Edgard Varèse who lived by the idea that percussion was as important as the other orchestral instruments were. He made that perfectly clear in the 1920s, with two scores for orchestra, Amériques and Arcana, and three works for mixed chamber ensembles, Offrandes, Hyperprism, and Intégrales, all of which used extensive amounts of percussion. Then in 1931 Varèse composed Ionisation for 13 percussionists, the first all-percussion score from any American or European composer, and he changed the game definitively, for everybody, ever since. Rare today is the composer – tonal or atonal, modernist or postmodern – who never writes for percussion ensemble or solo percussionist.

Varèse was born in Paris in 1883. He immigrated to the States in 1915 and became a citizen in 1927. The composer in Europe who did the most to redefine the role of percussion during the 1920s and ‘30s was Béla Bartók. In his First Piano Concerto, the percussion hugs the activity of the piano almost continually – at the very start of the work, it’s the first orchestral instrument to enter after the piano has begun. This concerto also called for some unusual percussion techniques, which led to difficulties with orchestras. Nicolas Slonimsky conducted the concerto’s Paris premiere in 1932, with the composer as soloist. Slonimsky later wrote:

“I had been warned that Bartók was a perfectionist, highly critical of conductors and players who failed to meet his standards. At my first rehearsal, the opening movement passed without much trouble. The second movement, however, which calls for special percussion effects, created difficulties. The score indicated that the suspended cymbal be struck from below rather than from above, and when the percussionist failed to follow these specific instructions, Bartók walked to his stand to show him how the cymbal had to be struck properly. Every minute of rehearsal time cost about two dollars, and I became rather uneasy waiting for Bartók to finish his demonstration. Finally, he returned to the piano, and I could resume the rehearsal. The last movement, in a rapid tempo, went smoothly. Bartók said to me after the concert that with one more rehearsal, the performance would have been perfect.”

The Russian-born Slonimsky had come to the States in 1923 and became a citizen in ‘31. A composer, conductor, and music historian, he championed the ultramodernists and led the world premiere of Ionisation in New York in 1933. For this very ambitious Paris concert, he was conducting along with Bartók’s concerto works by Mozart, Mussorgsky, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Dane Rudhyar, and the young Cuban composer Alejandro Caturla, a pupil of Nadia Boulanger, who worked in a polytonal, Afro-Cuban idiom. Bartók arrived just two days before the concert, and he demanded two rehearsals from Slonimsky; the person who paid for the extra rehearsal time was Charles Ives.

Ives was never a professional musician; he made his fortune in the insurance business, and it enabled him to be philanthropic for younger progressive composers and musicians in the 1930s and ‘40s – he helped out a lot of people, especially Henry Cowell and his projects and friends. There was never a meeting between Ives and Bartók. Ives never heard any of Bartók’s music either, and Bartók didn’t hear the rest of Slonimsky’s program. Bartók and Ives knew each other’s music, if at all, only on the page.

Now, the reason Bartók demanded extra rehearsal time for his concerto was not because Bartók needed it. Barely four years earlier, in December of 1927, he was supposed to make his American debut playing the concerto with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Willem Mengelberg. But there was not sufficient rehearsal time for the orchestra to play it properly, and instead they had to substitute Bartók’s Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra from 1904 – a lovely but more conventional work, derived from Franz Liszt, which predated Bartók’s exposure to folk music and impressionism. Knowing how far the composer had grown beyond this youthful score, Henry Cowell made sure to write of Bartók’s debut, “He is as great a master of composition as any living.”

Bartók’s First Piano Concerto was already tough enough for most orchestras in its tempi and rhythms; add to that the specialized demands he made on their percussionists – musicians who had been mostly unchallenged by the repertoire – and it simply required a lot of rehearsal. By February of 1928, the Cincinnati Orchestra was able to get on top of the score sufficiently for Bartók to premiere it in New York. The conductor was the great Bartók champion Fritz Reiner; a fellow Hungarian, Reiner had studied piano with Bartók at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest when he was a teenager in the early 1900s.

Cowell was also in the audience for that 1928 performance, and he was especially taken with the concerto’s second movement (which we’ve heard Slonimsky discuss): “New loveliness was revealed in each succeeding measure; and counterpoint of lines formed by percussion instruments, which were used canonically, was a unique musical element introduced.” I mentioned before that Bartók’s interest in tone-clusters, heard in this concerto, was excited by Cowell’s music. Well, in a sense Cowell ran up a debt of his own with this Bartók score. Yes, Cowell was closely involved with Ionisation: He was one of the percussionists playing in the world premiere, and in 1934 he conducted the West Coast premiere. But that same year, 1934, Cowell composed his first work for percussion ensemble, and it was the quiet and mysterious Ostinato Pianissimo, which owes a good deal to the second movement of this concerto. Bartók’s friend, the violinist Zoltán Székely, could have been describing Cowell’s score when he said that the concerto was “extreme in its finesse and full of percussion with the strangest pianissimo effects […] extremely fine work.”

In the 1930s Bartók wrote two scores that rank among his greatest. They were also explicit declarations that percussion was a full and equal partner to the other instruments, in both orchestral and chamber music. I’m referring of course to the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta of 1936 and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion from ‘37. And in some ways the second piece was more radical than the first. It’s one thing to make percussion as important as orchestral strings – in itself a groundbreaking declaration. Even Varèse tended not to combine strings and percussion much; his instrumentation emphasized woodwinds and brass.

Far more startling was Bartók’s decision to bring percussion into the recital hall alongside the piano. There was no real precedent for that. Afterwards you get plenty of scores for two pianists and two percussionists, from such composers as Lukas Foss, Luciano Berio, George Crumb, and Roger Reynolds. But in 1937, this combination of instruments for chamber music was so unusual that it opened the deep imagination, exactly the way percussion had for Charles Ives back in 1915. In the Universe Symphony, Ives had used percussion to represent what he called “the pulse of the universe’s life beat […] an attempt in tones […] to paint the creation, the mysterious beginnings of all things.” Something similar is happening in the opening of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. The musicologist Roy Howat was told by several of Bartók’s students that the composer “described the opening of the Sonata to them in terms of creation archetypes, of a cosmos evolving out of formlessness and timelessness.”

Those two scores – Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta and Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion – are also notable for Bartók’s detailed instructions concerning the physical placement of musicians and instruments. That concern informs his Second Violin Concerto as well, although the final score did not incorporate these instructions. I mentioned the violinist Zoltán Székely – Bartók wrote that concerto for Székely, who premiered it in Amsterdam in 1939 with Mengelberg leading the Concertgebouw Orchestra. According to Székely, “Bartók intended that some of the percussion instruments be placed in definite positions on the stage. He asked me to convey this information to Mengelberg, which I did. At the rehearsals and the first performance, the harp, the xylophone, and the celesta were very near to me, insuring a certain intimacy of ensemble during passages in the slow movement.”

Bartók is one of the few modernists – along with Ives and Darius Milhaud – who anticipated the postmodern interest in spatial music, where the physical distribution of the musicians is part of the piece. Interestingly enough, the great American proponent of spatial music was of course Henry Brant, who composed amazing spatial works from the 1950s to the 2000s.

Brant was born in 1913, in Montreal of American parents, and when he was 89 he recalled for Frank Oteri at newmusicbox.org an incident from the mid 1920s, when he was about 10 or 12 years old: “The Hard Hats Quartet of Toronto came to our house […] the first violinist of this quartet was Hungarian and he said, ‘You want to hear some music that you’d hear in Europe?’ And so they played Bartók’s First Quartet to the amazement of everybody present. […] My father […] never heard anything like that and nobody else there had either. So I asked him what kind of music that was and he said modern music. And I said I’m going to write modern music and that was my start.”

Another late-20th-century enthusiasm that crops up in Bartók’s music is microtonality. Several composers subdivided the half-tone in the early 20th century – John Foulds, Julián Carrillo, Alois Hába, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Hans Barth – but their works didn’t gain much traction, and they failed to excite long-term followers. You can hear quarter-tones in Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto for piano, violin, and 13 winds from 1925, his first score utilizing Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system; but other than that, the Viennese were not interested microtonality. That same year, 1925, Stravinsky complained that quarter-tone composition was “like ordinary music just a little off.” By 1930 he was dismissing it altogether: “I recognize only half-tones as the basis of music. Quarter-tones seem to me simply like glissandos between pairs of half-tones.”

The year before, in 1924, Charles Ives composed the Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for two pianos, one of his last works; he had been interested in microtonality since childhood. Henry Cowell’s Rhythmicana of 1931 was a concerto for rhythmicon and orchestra, the rhythmicon being a machine devised by Leon Theremin (with funding from Ives). It played complex rhythms and was tuned to the intervals of the overtone series. Edgard Varèse, like Cowell, also saw electronic music as the vehicle for new tunings, so he combined acoustic instruments with theremins in Ecuatorial from 1934 and tape music 20 years later in his masterpiece Déserts. Bartók’s work with microtonality comes later in his career, and there are quarter-tone passages in his Second Violin Concerto and his Sonata for Solo Violin from 1944, the last score he completed; other hands finalized his Third Piano Concerto and Viola Concerto.

According to Varése, Bartók would always complain that the equal-tempered tuning system was totally inadequate for notating pitch when he transcribed folk music; it obliged him to approximate microtonal inflections in his notation, and that bothered him. Varése by the way was greatly impressed at how precise Bartók’s rhythmic notation was, in both melody and prosody, the time signatures altered for an extra 8th or 16th beat, fractions of beats – never shoehorning the music into some familiar meter.

Varèse described Bartók’s notation in a lecture he gave at Columbia University in 1948; it was part of a series of talks he delivered about various 20th-century composers. His detailed notes for those talks are currently under lock and key in the Varèse archives in Switzerland, but I am happy to say I was able to read his notes concerning Bartók. I’m not at liberty to quote from them directly, but I can tell you some of the other points he emphasized. He said that Bartók’s music was frequently misunderstood because it embodied a duality: it could have austerity and incisiveness, a quality like steel, and tend toward abstraction; but there was also the folk-derived character of the music. Varèse understood that Bartók was interested in all forms of folk music, and that he brought to them the same standards of accuracy and precision, which he applied to his own composition. He also understood that Bartók was able to bring folk material into his music because he had assimilated its spirit; he could never use that music simply to spice up a score or make it sound exotic. Varèse said that Bartók was not given to creating theories about his own music and that he had learned music directly from music, not from definitions that had been formulated about it. And this applied to Bartók’s engagement with Beethoven and Liszt and Debussy and Richard Strauss, just as it did to his folk-music research.

Varèse had become friendly with Bartók in Europe early in the 1910s, when they were both young composers who shared a special fondness for Debussy and Strauss. Varése and Bartók were in communication in August of 1914, and on the eleventh of that month, France declared war on Austria-Hungary. Varése in Paris then got a score in the mail from Bartók in Budapest – he said it arrived four days after the war had been declared. But Bartók, alas, never received the manuscript score Varése sent him. After Varèse settled in New York, he became one of the first to play Bartók’s music in the United States. Varèse founded the short-lived New Symphony Orchestra, and in April of 1919 conducted Bartók’s 1910 score Two Pictures.

Another postmodern interest anticipated by Bartók is the use of extended performance techniques, especially in his percussion writing and of course his music for strings. Another early enthusiast in this area was Henry Cowell, playing what he called string piano, using his hands on the piano strings, sometimes with different implements – you don’t really hear these methods from Stravinsky or the Viennese. It’s not surprising that George Crumb, very sensitive to the possibilities of extended performance techniques, was drawn to Bartók’s music.

The early modernist composer Ruth Crawford grasped this connection between Bartók and Cowell immediately. She was born in Ohio in 1901 and by the mid 1920s was composing dissonant atonal pieces inspired by Scriabin and her friends Cowell and Rudhyar. Her masterpiece is probably her String Quartet 1931, which employed certain twelve-tone techniques and featured a contrapuntal treatment of dynamics. The year before she wrote it, she heard Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet, composed in 1928, and it made a big impression on her. She said it was something she “liked tremendously,” something “very fine.” Passages in the quartet reminded her of Henry Cowell’s classic string-piano piece The Banshee because of Bartók’s “glissandos on the strings very artistically used … But with more rhythmic interest and subtlety” than in The Banshee.

Crawford met Bartók in Hungary in 1931, arriving unannounced at his home with her Guggenheim letter as her introduction. She hadn’t written ahead, and so he didn’t have the time then to go over her music with her, although he would have been happy to do so. Instead he shared his folk interests with her, like he did with Cowell – and shared his interest in the harmonic series as well: “Childlike he showed me his Arabian and Hungarian flutes, and other things. Turned his back, told me not to look, and asked me to guess while he played a Jew’s Harp. From the subject of overtones, I excitedly branched to undertones and told him […] that Imre [Weisshaus] and I with a tuning fork on the edge of a piece of paper got the undertones as far as the 7th. He was surprised, said he had understood that they were only theoretical and I was inside ‘tickled’ to be able to tell him something.”

In 1932 Crawford married her teacher, Charles Seeger, a composer, theorist, and educator, who had also taught Henry Cowell. (One of Seeger’s children from his previous marriage was Pete Seeger, who became America’s great folk singer – he just passed away earlier this year at the age of 94.) Charles and Ruth were both interested in radical-left politics, and after they married they turned away from modernism – part of the belief, then viciously common in the Soviet Union, that modernism was somehow counter-revolutionary, elitist, decadent, and so forth. (If only it was! That would give it some real staying power in this country!)

Bartók however remained an example for Ruth Crawford Seeger even after this shift, because she turned to ethnomusicology, studying and documenting American folk song. She made hundreds of transcriptions of field recordings for the 1941 anthology Our Singing Country, and she composed over 100 piano accompaniments for her transcriptions, published as Folk Song U.S.A. in 1947. And she found, as Bartók had, that folk music operated outside the rules of classical functional tonality, harmony, and meter. In fact, Bartók insisted that his exposure to folk music “freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys” – an especially common problem for composers who specialized in the piano, such as Bartók and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Like him, she taught piano all her life. One of her students recalled being with her in the early 1950s – not that long before her death from cancer at age 52 – and how she wept as she spoke of Bartók’s difficult final years in the States.

When Bartók settled in America in the late autumn of 1940, most of the ultra-modernists of the ‘20s and ‘30s had been scattered and silenced. Henry Cowell had just been released from prison, pardoned only a few months earlier – he had been sent to San Quentin in 1936 for having sex with a 17-year-old boy. The Seegers had turned away from modernism, and by then Ives, Varèse, and Rudhyar had all stopped composing. Living in America proved a lot tougher for Bartók than it had been for Schoenberg or Stravinsky; like them he became a citizen in the 1940s, but Bartók had to struggle to support himself and his family – they never lived in poverty, but it was not easy. Bartók was not a celebrity, the way Stravinsky was. He was a musician’s musician, more like Schoenberg, only Schoenberg was a born pedagogue; he taught most of his life and was constantly surrounded by young composers, in Europe and in the States. Bartók, however, taught only piano. The composer and conductor Howard Hanson, when he was the director of the Eastman School, had wanted Bartók on the faculty. They already had plenty of piano teachers, however; he wanted Bartók to teach composition, but Bartók believed that composition was not teachable.

Still, one American composer did get to claim Bartók as his composition teacher: Jack Beeson, best known today for his 1965 opera Lizzie Borden; he also taught for many years at Columbia University, where his students included Anne LeBaron, Joan Tower, Charles Wuorinen, Harvey Sollberger, Bright Sheng, and John Kander. Beeson had done his graduate work at Eastman and wanted to study with Bartók, even though Hanson warned him that Bartók would never teach him composition. So Beeson sent a letter to Bartók. “The crux of my letter,” he later said, “was that I was going to be in New York and that I would like to show him my music for him to comment. I understood he did not teach composition, and I supposed he had good reasons for that, but I thought it was possible for one to learn something about composition from someone who thought he couldn’t teach it. And that, apparently, was the sentence that did it.” The two of them met for classes from October 1944 to March 1945. By then Bartók was already ailing. His health had never been good, from childhood, and it deteriorated steadily here in the States. When he first came here he fell into a depression – the collapse of Europe into genocidal warfare, self-imposed exile from his homeland, it takes a toll! And in September of 1945 at the age of 64, he died of leukemia in a New York City hospital.

But his creativity had enabled him to rally, and Bartók produced four remarkable scores in the States: the Concerto for Orchestra, Sonata for Solo Violin, his Third Piano Concerto, and an unfinished Viola Concerto. Two of those works, the Concerto for Orchestra and the Third Piano Concerto, became international sensations and were played everywhere – and still are, they’ve never left the repertory. People also began playing the complete cycle of Bartók’s six string quartets, and unanimity was very quickly reached that they were the greatest works in this medium since Beethoven. They too became a performance constant.

Bartók is the classic example of the artist who is recognized as soon as he dies. According to the music promoter Claire Reis, “Royalties from performances of his works during the last year of his life amounted to just $500. The year after his death I was told that royalties were close to $10,000.”

Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records – father of the composer Peter Lieberson, who passed away in 2011 – had dinner with Igor Stravinsky on September 27, 1945, the day after Bartók’s death. According to Robert Craft, the conductor and music critic who assisted Stravinsky in the last 24 years of his life, Lieberson reported that Stravinsky’s only reaction to Bartók’s passing was, “I never liked his music anyway.” Craft said that others had also heard Stravinsky say the same thing around that time, and that this response, “regrettably, rings true” to Stravinsky’s voice.

In fact Stravinsky did seem to appreciate at least some of Bartók’s work, especially in those years, because you cannot listen to his Symphony in Three Movements from 1945 without hearing Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta of 1936. Both Ned Rorem and Donald Mitchell have written about this. Rorem made sure to twist the knife a little, also pointing out, “Meanwhile one seeks in vain for any influence of Stravinsky – other than maybe his ‘daring’ – in the scores of Bartók.” He’s referring to Bartók having said, “One of the most important things that I learned from Stravinsky was daring.“ Which is absolutely true – hearing Stravinsky in the 1910s helped free up Bartók, and he did not hold back when he wrote the score for The Miraculous Mandarin in 1919, still probably the most jaw-dropping kickass piece of the era, especially in its full orchestral version from the ‘20s. There’s simply nothing like it.

Ned Rorem as a teenager had been one of the page turners when Bartók and his wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory, performed at Northwestern University in 1941, and Rorem also pointed out that “the central section of Jocasta’s air from [Stravinsky’s] Oedipus Rex [of 1928] is a rewrite of a central section of the last movement of Bartók’s First String Quartet” of 1909. Robert Craft was most likely correct when he insisted that Stravinsky did not know Bartók’s music all that well. But one score we know Stravinsky did know is the First Quartet. Stravinsky was a member of the Société Musicale Indépendante in Paris, which Maurice Ravel and others had founded in 1910; Debussy had proposed Stravinsky’s membership. Around late 1912, early 1913, Stravinsky had recommended Bartók’s string quartet to the Société for performance – Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire too. But as Bartók’s reputation grew, Stravinsky seems to have become less responsive to him. In 1925, when Stravinsky was organizing a concert of his music in Budapest, the agency there wrote to him, “In the event that Les noces is included in the program, our friend Béla Bartók would be pleased to play one of the piano parts.” Stravinsky never replied to the offer.

Here’s what Stravinsky had to say about Bartók in his 1958 book with Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky – his only extensive comment, on the record: “I met him at least twice in my life, once in London in the 1920s and later in New York in the early ‘40s, but I had no opportunity to approach him closer either time. I knew the most important musician he was, I had heard wonders about the sensitivity of his ear, and I bowed deeply to his religiosity. However, I never could share his lifelong gusto for his native folklore. This devotion was certainly real and touching, but I couldn’t help regretting it in the great musician. His death in circumstances of actual need has always impressed me as one of the tragedies of our society.”

What does Mel Brooks say when he plays Louis XVI in The History of the World, Part 1? “It’s good to be the King!” Seriously, this is when being a master really pays off, because if any of you were to say of Bartók, “I never could share his lifelong gusto for his native folklore. This devotion was certainly real and touching, but I couldn’t help regretting it in the great musician,” people would laugh in your face.

Let’s set aside what could be interpreted as condescension in that remark, and just look at this notion of Bartók as being fixated upon “his native folklore.” In fact, there was nothing provincial about Bartók’s sensibility. He was an ethnomusicologist, one of the leaders of his era in this field, and he devoted decades of his life to investigating what he referred to respectfully as “peasant music”: studying, transcribing, recording, arranging, discussing the folk music of Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, as well as Turkish and Arabic music. Before his health gave out here in the States, he was planning to go to Native reservations to hear their music. “All peasant music deeply interests me, and my goal is to extract the essence from it,” Bartók wrote in 1926.

I mentioned Erik Chisholm earlier. Bartók visited Chisholm in Scotland in the 1930s, and according to Chisholm’s wife, “Scottish folk music, and especially piobaireachd, happened to be Erik’s pet subject and particular study at that time. For years he had been doing considerable research in this line, so of course, he brought out various collections of folk music and gramophone records, and Bartók listened and studied these for hours. The result of this conversation was that the next day Bartók went to a well-known shop in town, which supplied all Highland requisites. He came home with a tartan rug, a chanter,” – that’s the part of the bagpipe you play, where the finger holes are – “all the piobaireachd music he could lay his hands on. He told us that the manager of the firm had arranged with one of our most noted Pipe-Majors to come next day to the Grand Hotel to play the bagpipes to him. Bartók was enchanted.”

Here’s another example, courtesy of Paul Bowles. He is best known for his fiction, of course, which includes The Sheltering Sky, but he was also a very fine composer. During his first stay in Morocco in the early 1930s, he made recordings of Moroccan Chleu dances and songs: a form of popular music derived from the folk music of the Souss people. A decade later, Henry Cowell got Bowles to make copies of those recordings for Bartók who was then living in the States. According to Bowles’ 1972 autobiography Without Stopping, he was later told by Cowell that “Bartók was incorporating the Chleu material in a piece. Sure enough, when I heard the Concerto for Orchestra, there was the music, considerably transformed, but still recognizable to me since I was familiar with every note of every piece I had copied for him.” Gena Dagel Caponi, an expert on Bowles, found “a Chaabiya Souassa song in the opening theme to the fourth movement of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.”

One final thing about this Stravinsky business. It’s hard to believe that someone who was universally recognized as the pre-eminent composer of the 20th century, the way Stravinsky was, could still feel so competitive. But genius is no proof against certain types of need, which can rule a person. It’s no accident that Stravinsky did not write twelve-tone music until after Arnold Schoenberg was in the cold, cold ground! Or that, in this quote, he made sure to reiterate the myth of Bartók dying in poverty.

Still, when Bartók died, there weren’t many people at the funeral. His wife Ditta, was there of course, and their son Peter, who had just finished serving in the U.S. Navy. The composer Arthur Lourié later wrote that he and Varèse “were the only musicians present” at the service – although the pianist Gyorgy Sandor, who had studied with Bartók in Budapest, was also there. He would premiere the Third Piano Concerto, which Bartók had written for Ditta, but she was shattered by her loss and didn’t perform it for many years. The composer Miriam Gideon recalled that she was teaching at Brooklyn College when the news broke of Bartók’s death. “I said to the class, ‘Today I read about the death of an eminent composer. Did anybody notice the obituary?’ Nobody had. When I told them that it was Béla Bartók, not one person in the room even knew the name.”

Someone who reacted as soon as he heard of Bartók’s passing was the poet Ezra Pound, born in Idaho in 1885. Pound was always very involved with music, having written criticism in England starting in 1908; he was a champion of the composer George Antheil, writing a book about his music in 1924. In the ‘20s and ‘30s Pound also composed strange, neo-medieval, proto-minimalist operas. And in the ‘30s in Rapallo, Italy, he produced concerts featuring works by Bartók, Stravinsky, Hindemith – composers he also promoted, writing criticism in Italian. Pound was especially taken with Bartók’s Fifth String Quartet, calling it “a work in his own idiom, built up into a complete and coherent structure. It is like no other known quartet. It definitely adds to the literature or whatever we are to call articulate repertory of work written for four stringed instruments. It projects from the preceding borders and frontiers of quartet composition, and is highly satisfactory in so doing.”

The Canadian composer, author, and educator R. Murray Schafer has written that Pound was “profoundly impressed” by Bartók’s Fifth String Quartet, “which he was afterward often to say he felt resembled his Cantos in the sense that it was the record of a struggle, a revolt against the entanglements of a civilization in decay.” Pound’s sense of Bartók was prophetic: He heard the Fifth Quartet at the Venice Biennale in September of 1936, which was barely four years before Bartók left Europe’s decaying civilization for good. There’s a photograph of Bartók taken when he was on vacation in Switzerland in July of 1939, and he’s standing there reading a newspaper, but he’s slumped against the side of the house like the news was a physical blow. “Decay” is too mild a term for the state of Europe’s so-called civilization by the end of the 1930s.

Rather than be crushed by the collapse of Europe, Bartók immigrated to the States. But first he gave a farewell concert in Budapest, on October 8, 1940. October 8, 1945, happens to be the date Ezra Pound assigned to the 84th of his Cantos. In its survey of calamities – American economic destructiveness, his own life in captivity, the eradication of the faithful and true by corruption and decay – Pound included the somber acknowledgment, “and Bartók has left us.” October 8, 1945, is also the date of the issue of Time magazine in which Pound read a brief report that Bartók had died on September 26.

Canto LXXXIV is the last of a series by Pound, which has come to be known as the Pisan Cantos, because they were written near Pisa while he was a prisoner of the United States Army. Unlike Bartók, Pound had chosen to stay behind and let Europe collapse on him. He had announced his support of the Axis powers in a series of radio broadcasts, made in Rome during the War, and so the Allied forces charged him with treason. At first he was kept in “a six-by-six-foot steel cage, open to the elements,” until he had a breakdown after a few weeks; then he was able to reside in a tent until he was brought back to the States. “If the hoar frost grip thy tent / Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent” – those are the last lines of Canto LXXXIV. Nevertheless, Pound was lucky; instead of being executed, he was declared psychologically unfit to stand trial and placed in a mental institution for about 12 years.

I should mention here that Pound’s respect for Bartók is all the more impressive because Bartók detested fascism in all its forms and was very vocal about it. He saw the imperialism, the anti-Semitism, the racial obsessions, the censorship and authoritarianism, as madness and criminality. Schoenberg, being Jewish, had to flee the Nazis in 1933; in January of that year, Bartók gave his final concert in Germany. In 1934 the Austrian government officially turned fascist, and it disbanded, along with all other workers’ associations, the Vienna Workers’ Symphony and Vienna Workers’ Chorus – the orchestra and chorus Anton Webern had been conducting for over a decade. Yet Webern was a Nazi sympathizer, even though they banned his music. Berg died in 1935, the same year Stravinsky was singing the praises of Mussolini to the Italian press. 1936 was the year Bartók stopped concertizing in Vienna. In 1937 he withdrew permission for the broadcast of his works on Italian and German radio, and he changed his publisher, leaving Universal Edition in Vienna and going to Boosey & Hawkes in England.

But the Germans still kept playing his music, a lot. The Nazis banned all modernist music except Bartók’s, because the Hungarian government had gotten into bed with the German/Austrian empire and each was careful not to offend the other. János Breuer’s research has revealed that Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta was performed at least a dozen times “in Germany between 1937 and 1941. In no other country was this masterpiece played so frequently in Bartók’s lifetime. Even the Budapest premiere […] was preceded by” German performances. The Nazi critics would always attack Bartók’s music viciously, of course – you could get into a lot of trouble if you didn’t denounce it!  But it was OK to play it, and so Bartók was performed then by such conductors as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Eugen Jochum, Oswald Kabasta, Paul van Kempen, Franz Konwitzschny, a lot of folks.

It was the Hungarians who banned Bartók’s music, after the war – once they were under the thumb of the Soviet Union. In the late 1940s the Hungarian composer György Ligeti studied at the Budapest Academy where Bartók had taught less than a decade before; and Ligeti went on to teach there from 1950 until 1956, when he fled the country after the Hungarian Revolution. He later told the clarinetist and conductor Richard Dufallo that “Hungary as a Communist country was totally isolated […] Bartók was prohibited … his main pieces. His first period was allowed, until the First String Quartet, and then the last pieces, the Third Piano Concerto, Concerto For Orchestra; however, the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, while everybody knew it from before, was not allowed […] it was too modernistic.” The West was finally recognizing the extent of Bartók’s genius, and in his native land, almost all of his music was banned.

In 1949 the composer Virgil Thomson wrote of Bartók, “No other musician of our century has faced its horrors quite so frankly. The quartets of Bartók have a sincerity, indeed, and a natural elevation that are well-nigh unique in the history of music. I think it is this lofty quality, their intense purity of feeling, that gives them warmth and that makes their often rude and certainly deliberate discordance of sound acceptable to so many music lovers of otherwise conservative tastes. Nobody, as we know, ever minds expressive discord.”

Thomson was born in Missouri in 1896 and studied with Nadia Boulanger in 1922. Six years later he composed the classic proto-minimalist opera Four Saints in Three Acts, to an original libretto by Gertrude Stein; his other great collaboration was with the filmmaker Robert Flaherty, scoring Flaherty’s final masterpiece, Louisiana Story, in 1948. Thomson was also the chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954, and his criticism was really great for cutting through the chatter about something and getting down to its basics. Listen to what he said about Bartók in 1948, again emphasizing this matter of expressivity: “Music of passionate and personal expressivity is a small part indeed of standard repertory. There is a little of it, though very little, in Mozart, a bit more in Beethoven, some in Mendelssohn, a great deal in Schumann and Chopin, less in Brahms, and then practically no more at all till you get to Bartók.”

When I first read that, I thought to myself, Yes, of course, he’s absolutely right – wait a minute! What about Bruckner and Mahler? And then in the next sentence, Thomson said, “Its presence in Bruckner and Mahler, though certain, is obscured by monumental preoccupations.” YES! Right on the money! This guy knows what he’s talking about!

Thomson went on with this idea of personal expressivity and sincerity: “Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner, Strauss and Schoenberg, even Debussy and the modernists operate mostly on a level of complexity that prevents an efficient interpreter from going too wild and the meaning from getting too private. […] Music of personal lyricism, Schumann, for instance, can be played or sung without antics and often is. But it cannot be rendered convincingly without personal involvement. This poses the problem of sincerity.”

And here Thomson gives some very meaningful advice for all performing musicians: “Sincerity is not a requisite for theatrical work, for evocative work, for any music that is, however poetic, objective in character. Taste, intelligence, and temperament are the only requirements. These will enable you to get into any role and out of it again, to perform it perfectly, to communicate through it. They are not sufficient for a proper rendering of Schumann’s songs or of the Bartók quartets. These you must feel.”

Personal expressivity was not much of a concern for Stravinsky who very loudly derided the notion of music as an expressive medium – a belief he did not share with the Viennese, not even Webern, and certainly not Berg or Schoenberg. But it is still perfectly fair to say that expressivity is – what? sublimated? in the Second Viennese School. Made to obey the rules may be closer to it. They were glad to rely on the twelve-tone system for “a level of complexity that prevents […] the meaning from getting too private,” as Thomson said. But the first thing that strikes you when you hear Ives or Cowell or Varèse or Ruth Crawford Seeger or Carl Ruggles is the immediacy of the feeling – it comes right through. There is nothing impersonal, nothing striving to become impersonal, in their music. The same is absolutely true of Bartók.

Thomson was also struck by the way Bartók’s music evolved from impressionism to expressionism, because just about every other composer went from impressionism to neo-classicism. In fact, Bartók moved fairly easily between impressionism and expressionism in the late 1900s and 1910s, and in a sense he even brought the two together with the celebrated “night music” passages in his scores of the ‘20s and ‘30s – Out Of Doors for piano, the Fourth and Fifth String Quartets, the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta.

By the same token, because Bartók’s music embraced neither neo-classicism nor the twelve-tone methodology, he was free to incorporate some of their techniques into his own work; techniques which he in fact in some ways anticipates. It’s no accident that Roger Sessions felt a strong kinship with Bartók during the 1940s, when Sessions’ music was in a state of transition from his earlier neo-classical works to a reliance on the twelve-tone method starting in the 1950s. In 1947, when Time magazine said that passages in Sessions’ Symphony No. 2 “reminded hearers of the atonalist music of Hindemith and Schoenberg,” Sessions told them he “believes that he is closer to Hungary’s late, great Béla Bartók.”

In the twenty years from 1907 to 1926, Bartók edited and prepared for publication a large amount of keyboard music of the Baroque and Classical eras: Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier, many sonatas by Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven – works by Schubert and Schumann and Chopin too. By 1927 Bartók was especially interested in Italian keyboard music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – such composers as Girolamo Frescobaldi, Domenico Zipoli, Benedetto Marcello, and Michelangelo Rossi. He played their music in his recitals too, and he commented around this time, “In recent years I have considerably occupied myself with music before Bach, and I believe that traces of this are to be noticed in the Piano Concerto and the Nine Little Piano Pieces.” Traces and more can also be heard in the contrapuntal activity of Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto from 1933. So there are neo-classical strains to his thought and composition.

By the same token, his two Violin Sonatas of 1921 and ’22, which I mentioned earlier, come very close to his own version of twelve-tone organization, and they predate Schoenberg’s first completely twelve-tone score, his Piano Suite of 1923. There was something in the air then, really. Other composers of the 1910s and early ‘20s had also found themselves at the end of the trail in writing highly chromatic tonal music, and they were developing similar organizational methods to keep the music going: Josef Matthius Hauer in Austria; the Russian composers Scriabin, Lourié, and Nikolai Roslavets; there was also Ruggles in America. But of course it was Schoenberg who codified the twelve-tone method. So when Bartók wrote his Second Violin Concerto in 1939, he made sure to feature a recurring chromatic figure in the score, and he later told the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, “I wanted to show Schoenberg that one can use all the twelve notes in a row in a thousand different ways and yet remain tonal.”

Schoenberg himself came to respect Bartók for basically that reason, the totally integrated nature of his composition. Of course, this was after Schoenberg had settled in the United States and was teaching in California. Sabine Feisst has done a brilliant book about Schoenberg in America called Schoenberg’s New World, and the composer Roger Nixon told her that he brought to a private lesson with Schoenberg the score of Bartók’s Petite Suite for piano, which Bartók had arranged in 1936 from some of his 44 Duos for Two Violins. She wrote that Schoenberg let Nixon “analyze the first movement’s motivic structure (variation, extension, development, phrase formations, contrapuntal relations), adding to Nixon’s sightings until every note in the piece was accounted for. To Nixon, such lessons were marked by a ‘sense of mutual discovery.’ Schoenberg, who had been unfamiliar with the Suite, concluded at the end of that lesson: ‘Bartók was a real master.’”

Some twenty years earlier, back in Europe, however, Schoenberg held a less kindly view of Bartók’s ability. In 1923 he carped about different notational procedures Bartók had developed, declaring them “inadequate and pedantic. They lead to contradictions, consequently cannot be applied consistently, and make a demand on the memory that is unjustified and illogical.” The composer Hanns Eisler was studying with Schoenberg at this time in the early 1920s, and according to him, “Folk music gave Schoenberg a good deal of pleasure. […] In his original works, however, he could do nothing with folk music. He considered folk music, by comparison with classical music, to be a primitive early form, which the classical composer had already assimilated in any case.”

Alban Berg and Anton Webern seemed to ascribe their resistance to Bartók’s music more as a matter of taste than anything else. Berg commented in 1920, “I consider Bartók has a very original and powerful character, although his character is far distant from me, personally.” In Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer’s biography of Webern, they say, “Although he knew the music of Béla Bartók very well, Webern apparently lacked affinity for it.” Webern in fact conducted works by Ives and Cowell and Milhaud and Gustav Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg and his own, but not Bartók. Webern’s student Arnold Elston reported that, when Webern heard Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet, he said, “It is too cacophonous for me.” Elston concluded, “Evidently, Webern’s aural sensibilities were such that, though he was fond of the most complex dissonant chords, he found the Bartókian clusters of minor seconds grating on the ear.”

II. Late Modernism

Let’s turn now to late modernism in American music, and a good person to begin with is Milton Babbitt, who transformed Schoenberg’s twelve-tone methodology. Babbitt was born in Philadelphia in 1916 and passed away just a few years ago, in 2011 – a truly amazing man and a unique artist. He developed totally serialized music, working with rows not just of pitches but rhythms and dynamics and timbres. Babbitt was struck by the way in which Bartók employed serialization, as “one of many integrative methods in the small […] its specific character is determined by the context in which it occurs. Never does it create the context.” Babbitt recognized in Bartók’s music “a thorough awareness of the crucial problems confronting contemporary musical composition” – namely, how to sustain a totally chromatic situation. What impressed him was that Bartók had developed “a total and personally unique solution to these problems.” He said this individual quality especially characterized the six string quartets, that they had a “basic unity of purpose that invested all six with the character of a single, self-contained creative act.”

This is purity Babbitt is describing, purity in the creative solution and purity in the creative act – something Thomson also pointed out, and something that automatically attracted Pound to this music. Babbitt insisted, “Bartók’s concern for the total composition, and the resultant evolution of the maximum structure from a minimum assumption, makes it irrelevant whether one initiates a consideration of his music with the detail or the entirety. […] Bartók’s formal conception emerges as the ultimate statement of relationships embodied in successive phases of musical growth.”

Let me add here that Pierre Boulez, born in Paris in 1925, is Europe’s great late-modernist serial composer, and he has described very similar virtues in Bartók. Bartók’s music of the early 1920s, such as the two Violin Sonatas, approached what Boulez called “an organic chromaticism not far removed from that of Berg and Schoenberg.” He said that Bartók’s solution to that crucial problem confronting contemporary musical composition was “a wholly personal style that represents a balance between folk and art music and between diatonicism and chromaticism […] His success lay in the fact that his poetic genius enabled him to realize his ideas effectively. Whether it is in a brutal violence animating a ‘sound material in fusion’ or in a tranquil gentleness glowing in a ‘halo of grating sounds and rainbow colors,’ Bartók is incomparable and remains unique.”

“A wholly personal style,” “remains unique”; Babbitt called it “a total and personally unique solution.” A lot of the later modernist composers tended to see Bartók as the final flowering of a European tradition – and something of a freak of nature at that. You can’t really take much from it, is the implication – only Bartók could do those things to folk materials and get these results: “poetic genius enabled him to realize his ideas effectively,” as Boulez said. The critic Peter Yates summed it up in his 1967 book, Twentieth Century Music: “Bartók’s art remains an island bound by his isolating genius, an example but not a model for other composers.”

As a matter of fact, you can’t even have the same folk materials that Bartók worked with – not anymore. The people that this music sprang from and their way of life were pretty much annihilated by the two world wars in Europe – and Bartók was always absolutely adamant that you had to live with these people and understand their lives in order to work with their music. In 1931, after more than a quarter of a century of field research, he wrote, “In my opinion, the effects of peasant music cannot be deep and permanent unless this music is studied in the country as part of a life shared with the peasants. It is not enough to study it as it is stored up in museums. It is the character of the peasant music, indescribable in words, that must find its way into our music. It must be pervaded by the very atmosphere of peasant culture. Peasant motifs (or imitations of such motifs) will only lend our music some new ornaments: nothing more.”

Which means that this kind of composition is pretty much impossible for most European composers; most Japanese too. And forget about the USA, Canada, and Australia, unless they get down with their native populations – not an easy intimacy, compromised by generations of racial conflict and historic grievances. Some enterprising Chinese or Latin American or South Asian or Siberian or African or Middle Eastern composer could still strike gold this way, of course. The catch is that none of them can have the same relationship to the classical-music idiom that Bartók had as a European – the other half of the equation is lacking. Which suggests that these other countries will probably have their breakthroughs more in new music or even pop music than in concert, or classical, music.

In 1970 the English writer Donald Mitchell asserted in his book The Language of Modern Music, “The possibilities opened up by the rediscovery of folksong […] must stand alongside neo-classicism and serial technique as the third and last of the ‘answers’ to the question: ‘How to go on?’” Now you know why postmodernism was necessary, because modernism pretty much ran out of options. If those indeed are the three legs of our stool – folksong revival, neo-classicism, serialism – then Bartók, as I’ve explained, represents as much of a cul-de-sac for Western composition as Stravinsky and Schoenberg do. Let’s not forget, by the 1950s almost all the neo-classical composers were writing twelve-tone music, and almost no one today is writing twelve-tone music. People are still using serial and neo-classical techniques, but they’re not writing serial or neo-classical music. Kind of like what Bartók did…

Both dodecaphony and neo-classicism are exclusivistic: They’re based on keeping certain sounds outside of the music. The twelve-tone methodology was devised as a systematic way to avoid tonality; neo-classicism required recognizably classical and baroque models to provide contrast and form for modernist treatments of harmony and rhythm. Now, you would think that folksong revival would have to be just as exclusive, but Bartók’s music clearly showed that anything was possible. With an openness that anticipates postmodern attitudes, his work could assimilate serialism, neo-classicism, impressionism, expressionism – and unpitched instruments and spatial distribution and alternate tuning systems and extended performance techniques – all within a folksong-revival context, because Bartók approached folksong revival through pantonality, which by its very nature is inclusive – no matter what gets tossed into the mix, the result is still pantonal.

Earlier in discussing pantonality, I mentioned the composer Ross Lee Finney and his concern with pitch polarity. In January of 1928, Béla Bartók performed his Sonata for Piano in Minnesota, at the St. Paul Music Club, as part of his first American tour. And in the audience was the 21-year-old Ross Lee Finney. He was born in Minnesota in 1906 and passed away in 1997 at the age of 90, bless his dear soul. He had gotten his BA at Carlton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and had begun studying with Nadia Boulanger the previous year. The Sonata greatly impressed him, and he wrote about this experience in his memoir, more than sixty years later: “I was completely overwhelmed by the performance of his Sonata for Piano, which was unlike any music I had ever heard before. It was percussive and very tight with very little rubato, yet beautifully shaped, with a slow movement that evolved like an improvisation around a pedal tone in the upper voice, often foreign to the harmony of the bass. I had a chance to meet him after the concert and he seemed to know Boulanger and to think highly of her.”

Nadia Boulanger, however, did not have the impression that Bartók held her in high regard – not by 1928, anyway. She had been interested in his music early on, of course. In the summer of 1922 Aaron Copland was just 21 himself; he had begun studying with Boulanger the previous year, and she had asked him to bring her whatever new scores he found interesting. So he brought Bartók’s 1920 piano score Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, which Copland described to her as “an exquisite little work.” But when Copland heard Bartók play his Sonata for Piano at a festival in Baden-Baden in 1927 – a few months before Finney heard the piece – Copland wondered if Bartók was not becoming limited by his own distinctive sound: “Nothing could be more characteristically Bartók than this sonata with its Hungarian folk tunes, its incisive rhythms, its hard, unsentimental quality. To possess so characteristic a manner carries with it the danger of self-repetition, and Bartók has come perilously near it in his sonata.”

By this time Bartók had fallen out of favor with Boulanger, according to her biographer Léonie Rosenstiel. It seems that in late 1924, early ’25, she and Bartók had corresponded concerning her request for his answers to a “detailed questionnaire on musical and artistic philosophy, the influence of society on music, and the composer’s view of current musical trends in general.” Bartók seems to have ignored most of her questions, and instead simply replied that “he divided ‘modern music’ into two broad, general categories – a reaction against romanticism, and a combined category of nationalism and neo-classicism, finding in Stravinsky the epitome of both nationalism and neo-classicism. He rejected what he called ‘mechanical systems’ of writing music, as well as the grafting-on of non-essential nationalistic elements that would otherwise be out of place.”

This answer parroted Boulanger’s own words from an article she wrote for the journal Le Monde musical, and she was not amused: “Nadia was incensed at Bartók’s reply. From that time on, she refused to analyze the composer’s works, either with her students or in her lectures, until after Bartók’s death.” That’s 20 years of silence. “By saying nothing substantial about him, she had in her own mind consigned the composer to artistic limbo. Some of Nadia’s later students were extremely puzzled to hear her change the subject whenever Bartók’s name came up in the course of discussion.”

Elliott Carter, born in New York in 1908 – and who just passed away in 2012 at the age of 103 – spent several of his student years, from 1932 to ’35, with Nadia Boulanger. In 1937 Carter began writing reviews for the journal Modern Music, and one of his first pieces was about the premiere of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Which he praised: “Bartók’s work is the finest of his compositions to be heard in these parts for a long time. […] Throughout there is great beauty of sonority and a very elegant kind of writing that is as rare as it is delightful in modern music. […] The first movement, a beautiful fugue, has a simple grand plan and a continuity of expression which rank it with the best of recently composed music.” But this was 1937 and Carter was still poppin’ fresh from the bakery then. (That’s a pun: boulanger is French for baker.) Like Copland ten years earlier, he felt the need to temper his own regard for this composer, so he also wrote that Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta “has much greater clarity than his more recent quartets and is less choppy, with greater broadness than the Dance Suite.”

Vague enough for music criticism, I suppose. But keep in mind that those less clear string quartets Carter was referring to are Bartók’s Fourth and Fifth – two classic works that were very useful to Carter’s own music. The musicologist Dörte Schmidt has pointed out that “Bartók, whose Fourth Quartet is alluded to in Carter’s First Quartet, is among the models that played a role in Carter’s neo-classical phase as well: The finale to the Quartet in C bears a strong resemblance to the beginning of the finale of Bartók’s Fifth Quartet.”

About forty years ago Elliott Carter told me that, when he was a student about forty years earlier, “I sometimes wanted to write like Stravinsky or Bartók.” Another young composer who felt that same way at that same time, the early to mid 1930s, was Conlon Nancarrow – like Carter, he too became one of the great late-modernist innovators in polyrhythm and multiple tempi with his incomparable series, Studies for Player Piano. Nancarrow told the composer William Duckworth, “The things that were being played at that time were certainly not ultramodern. […] I did hear some Bartók then for the first time. They also played Strauss, Debussy, and a few others that weren’t quite as dramatic for me. Mainly Stravinsky and Bartók were the ones who impressed me the most.”

In 1959 Copland wrote again about Bartók – and Boulanger was still alive and kicking then (in the 1960s, the young Philip Glass would study with her). Copland said of Bartók, “No one who knew his music at the time of his death in 1945 could have predicted the sudden upsurge of interest in his work and its present worldwide dissemination. One would have thought his musical speech too dour, too insistent, too brittle and uncompromising to hold the attention of the widest audience. And yet we were proved wrong. Conductors and performers seized upon his work at what must have been the right moment, a moment when the big public was ready for his kind of rhythmic vitality, his passionate and despairing lyricism, his superb organizational gift that rounds out the overall shape of a movement while keeping every smallest detail relevant to the main discourse.” Note that last point, an essential one to Copland, who by then was composing twelve-tone music.

What I find surprising in those remarks of Copland’s is the idea that Bartók’s musical speech was “too dour,” because Bartók is the European modernist of his era with the keenest sense of humor. There aren’t many laughs from the Viennese; and Stravinsky’s music has more of an arch or ironic quality to its sound, rather than funny ha-ha – this is especially true of his neo-classical works, a kind of deadpan wit. But Bartók had an earthy, Puckish sense of humor, closer to Ives or Cowell, with a fondness for satire and burlesque and plain old jokes, such as at the end of the Fifth String Quartet – sometimes even outright buffoonery, as in his piece for Benny Goodman, Contrasts for clarinet, violin, and piano, composed in 1938. You’ll also hear it in his use of glissandi in several of his string quartets: the musical equivalent of crossing your eyes and sticking out your tongue! I think it’s another reason why, when he was in his early twenties, Bartók had been so keen for Richard Strauss – he used to perform his own piano transcription of Ein Heldenleben. And you can hear reminiscences of Heldenleben’s critics and the sounds of laughter decade after decade in Bartók’s music, in the First Violin Concerto, First Piano Concerto, First Violin Rhapsody, Contrasts, even the Concerto for Orchestra, in the fourth movement, when he makes fun of Dmitry Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 for using a worn Viennese café tune.

III. Jazz

The explosion of interest in Bartók’s music after his passing, which Copland described, spread beyond the world of classical music, and a number of jazz musicians were also listening to and learning from Bartók; by the same token, Bartók found jazz of great interest – a taste prompted by his devotion to folk music. According to Musical America in 1927, when Bartók first visited the States, he was expressing interest in “the latest things in American jazz … pretty nearly as soon as he got down the gangplank.” For the Musical Leader he gave an interview to Marion Bauer – she was a Boulanger pupil who taught composition at New York University for many years; her students included Milton Babbitt and Miriam Gideon. Bauer said that Bartók encouraged more white Americans to listen to African-American music, and added, “He finds that the Jazz band has also been harmed by its popularity. He feels that we must get back to the source and get the Negro music in its unspoiled, natural state, in order for it to have a worth-while influence on art.”

Before Bartók left Europe for good in 1940, he published the sixth and final volume of his Mikrokosmos, a series of instructional piano etudes that progress in difficulty. This last volume included his Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm, the fourth of which he described as “Very much in the style of Gershwin. Gershwin’s tonality, rhythm, and color. American folk-song feeling. Moderate tempo but vital, crisp, and accented.” By the way, when Maurice Ravel toured the States, there was a reception for him in New York City in January of 1928, and among the musicians present to meet and greet him were Bartók, then also touring America, Edgard Varèse, and George Gershwin.

After Bartók settled in New York City he began working at Columbia University in 1941. He was never a teacher there; they gave him an honorary doctorate, and he set to work transcribing the Parry Collection of recorded Serbo-Croatian folk songs. In May of 1940, a few months prior to his emigration from Hungary, he had come to the States to record Contrasts with Benny Goodman and Josef Szigeti, and that’s when he arranged this gig for himself. The composer Douglas Moore, another former Boulanger pupil, was then teaching at Columbia, and he helped Bartók put the deal together.

The university’s student radio station in the early 1940s was CURC (the Columbia University Radio Club). They would broadcast various shows, one of which involved inviting different music professors to listen to jazz records and discuss the music. We know that they did broadcasts with Bartók, but none seem to have survived. However, one show that has been recovered includes a professor who agrees with Bartók from last week’s show: a favorable reaction to Coleman Hawkins playing “Body and Soul.”

The writer Edward Alexander was a Columbia student in 1941, and he wrote a short memoir of Bartók for The Hungarian Quarterly in 2003. Bartók gave Douglas Moore’s class a special talk on the development of his music, in a room packed to the gills. He concluded by playing Allegro Barbaro and just blew the roof off the place. Afterward, as he was walking away from the classroom, Alexander caught up with Bartók. The way he wrote about it so many years later is really quite wonderful:

“‘Excuse me, Mr. Bartók, may I please speak with you?’

“He turned to me and for the first time I looked directly into a pair of eyes I can only describe as piercing.

“‘Yes,’ he said quietly.

“I am pleased that I asked my question because after sixty years, I still find his reply revelatory.

“‘Your entire body of work is so deeply classical, so European, so profound. Can you tell me how you could accept a commission to compose something for a popular musician like Benny Goodman?’

“Far from being amused, irritated, or condescending, Bartók continued his serious mien, leaned close, seized my arm, and said with great conviction, ‘Because jazz is America’s most important contribution to music,” turned on his heel, and walked into Professor Moore’s office.”

A great many jazz composer/musicians also admired Bartók’s “contribution to music.” This is an area that really requires its own investigation, because it’s so rich; I’m going to offer only a few highlights and name some names. There’s composer/arranger Chico O’Farrill, the Latin music innovator who brought Afro-Cuban music into jazz – he studied the Bartók string quartets. Bill Evans was playing Bartók – he could sight read the piano music, according to Tony Scott. Herbie Nichols wrote an ensemble piece called Bartók. Richard Twardzik had an early Mikrokosmos-inspired score from the late 1940s, which he called Bouncin’ with Bartók. It was Twardzik’s enthusiasm for Bartók that brought him together with Charlie Parker.

When the Boston radio DJ John McClellan interviewed Parker in 1953, he knew about Parker’s tastes and announced that he was going to play something that “might surprise some of our listeners,” and he put on Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Parker identified it and said it was his favorite. During their talk he admitted that he was just getting into what he called “modern classics” when Bartók died in 1945, and that he regretted that he never got to meet the man he considered “one of the most finished and accomplished musicians who ever lived.”

In another radio interview, Parker told Nat Hentoff, “The first time I heard a Bartók concerto, I couldn’t dig it at all. Couldn’t stand it. It said nothing to me. But a couple of months later, I heard the same Bartók concerto, and it got way inside me. That’s what got me started on writing a jazz concerto.” Another time, Parker said, “What you hear depends on so many things in yourself. Like I heard Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto over here and later, I heard it again in France. I was more acclimated to life, then, and I heard things in it I never heard before.” Parker had Bartók played at the ceremony for his two-year-old daughter Pree after her death from cystic fybrosis in March of 1954 – almost one year to the day before her father’s death at the age of 34.

I think Jackie McLean must have understood something of Parker’s feeling about Bartók, because McLean insisted, “The blues feeling is part of jazz, and I even hear the blues in the greatest of European composers, people like Bartók that I love so much.” That piece which Bartók wrote for Benny Goodman, Contrasts – Nicolas Slonimsky called its opening movement “the Hungarian counterpart of the American blues.” Bartók had told Joseph Szigeti that it was inspired by the central “Blues” section of Maurice Ravel’s Violin Sonata.

In 1940, when Bartók was in Los Angeles recording Contrasts with Goodman and Szigeti, according to Goodman, “One day at rehearsal I said to him, ‘You know, Mr. Bartók, I think I’m going to have to have three hands to play this particular part, it’s so difficult.’ And instead of raising a big fuss about it, he said, ‘Well, Mr. Goodman, just approximate. Play as close as you can.’ I thought that was quite something for one of the great composers of all time.”

The composer/arranger Eddie Sauter, who worked a lot with Benny Goodman in those years, got to meet Bartók then and said later that the experience for him was “like meeting God” – even though Bartók apparently advised him, “Young man, listen to Palestrina.” You can hear echoes of Bartók in some of Sauter’s later work with Stan Getz, like the string writing for Getz’s classic 1961 LP Focus, or reminiscences of the Concerto for Orchestra in Sauter’s 1966 Tanglewood Concerto for Getz and the Boston Pops. Lennie Tristano was, like Richard Twardzik, another pianist who had Bartók in common with Charlie Parker; it was Tristano who got Warne Marsh into listening to Bartók. Lee Konitz and composer/arranger Bill Russo have spoken about their investigations of the Bartók string quartets. Stan Kenton put Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra at the top of his list of desert-island records for a British radio show in the ‘50s.

John Coltrane used to play along with a recording of the Concerto for Orchestra. He had been exposed to Bartók’s music when he was studying at the Granoff School of Music in the early 1950s, and later that decade, around the time he was playing with Thelonious Monk, he started playing fourth chords and working with sequences of fourths, and so he would play along with the first and third movements of the Concerto for Orchestra, which are built around the interval of the fourth in different ways.

Marty Ehrlich was very insightful when he noted the parallels between Coltrane and Bartók: “[W]ithin their respective cultures they represented a few of the same things. People who didn’t listen to contemporary music often listened to Bartók. So here are these two artists who communicated beyond the style they played in. Both were very innovative, expanding the language of their idiom, but at the same time used traditional and folk materials in their music. Radical conservatives, really. They both had visceral emotions with involved processes, so they grabbed you intellectually and emotionally in a way that doesn’t often happen.”

The affinity between Bartók and jazz exists on many levels. There’s this depth of feeling and intensity of the energy; like Varèse, Ives, and Cowell – and unlike Stravinsky or the Viennese – Bartok’s music operates on a visceral level, and that brings it closer to jazz. The importance of percussion is another common denominator. There’s jazz as a form of folk music, and the deeper roots both jazz and folk music have in dancing. Stravinsky wrote a lot of music for the dance, but Bartók wrote a lot of music that comes from dancing, and that’s something different: A fundamentally kinetic quality characterizes the building blocks of his music. Most of Bartók’s compositions include – and often conclude with – dance music. That type of finale defines his work in the States: Dances characterize the last movements of the Concerto for Orchestra, Sonata for Solo Violin, Third Piano Concerto, and the Viola Concerto. There are genuinely tragic passages in all four works, some of the most wrenching music Bartók ever wrote. As Virgil Thomson pointed out, “No other musician of our century has faced its horrors quite so frankly.” The first newsreels of the concentration camps being liberated were shown in April of 1945. Bartók was composing his last two concertos after America dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that August. But none of his final scores conclude with tragedy. You get this sense of the man practically whipping himself not to give up, to keep going. To keep dancing.

IV. Postmodernism

I began this talk by saying that it would include a consideration of Bartók’s impact on postmodern music. So I should point out here that I recognize that the term postmodern is itself still somewhat controversial – there are learned musicologists and scholars who consider it imprecise and artificial. I must respectfully disagree; I think that, over the last 60 years, music has undergone a profound shift in imagination. For all of modernism’s shocking new liberties in harmony, rhythm, and tonality, the view modernism held of music and of composition – the attitude, the definitions, the conceptualizations – all still fundamentally an extension of classical and romantic mind-sets. What modernism did was keep things alive by extending the goalposts of beauty well into the stands, discovering aesthetic satisfaction and gratification in dissonance, polyrhythm, and atonality. Postmodernism takes music out of the stadium altogether.

Modernism revealed the arbitrary nature of traditional harmony, rhythm, and tonality, which so many for so long had taken as gospel. Postmodernism can be seen as a reaction to and a critique of modernism, turning modernism’s x-ray back upon itself by exploring modernist freedoms without relying on modernist conceptualizations or materials. Modernism shattered traditional music into an array of individualized styles and methods; postmodernism develops techniques to appropriate, deconstruct, and recontextualize what is available today, when virtually any and all the music of the world can be heard.

A postmodern composer isn’t choosing between traditionalism and modernism, not when the materials of jazz, blues, rock, pop music, folk music, world music, noise, and environmental sound can also be employed, either transformed or in quotation – but employed without necessarily pursuing their genres’ conventions or conceptualizations. This postmodern openness has vitalized numerous areas of musical exploration for more than half a century: multiculturalism, minimalism, multimedia, instrument building, alternate tuning systems, extended performance techniques, theatrical music, spatial music, ambient music, computer music, sampling, free improvisation.

It’s very easy to trace the musical evolution from Wagner to Bruckner to Mahler to Schoenberg to Webern to Babbitt. The lineage is crystal clear. So too is the evolution from Debussy and Ravel to Stravinsky and Messiaen and then Boulez. Postmodernism represents a true break in the concert-music tradition, and it comes with the music of Harry Partch and John Cage. Cage studied with Schoenberg, and yet it is not possible to draw a direct line from Schoenberg’s music to Cage’s. Nothing Schoenberg ever wrote will lead you to indeterminate composition, to Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radios or to 4’33”, a score in which no sound is performed. And there’s nothing in Stravinsky that leads you to the just-intonation tunings and new instruments of Harry Partch. Both Cage and Partch represent a sweeping rejection of how music had developed – and they’ve been profoundly influential for Western music over the last sixty years. Each was doing important work by the 1930s, but it was in the ‘50s that they reached a whole new level of expression, and the effect has proven to be indelible.

We all know there are certain late-romantic and post-romantic composers who anticipate modernism in various ways: Liszt, Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss. So too are there certain early modernists who anticipate postmodern practices: Erik Satie, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Béla Bartók. I’ve already discussed Bartók’s involvement with spatial music, extended performance techniques, and microtonality. And I wouldn’t dare attempt to analyze for you how the man appropriated, deconstructed, and recontextualized the peasant music of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and other nations. Although I will point out that the way he did it was with true love and humility – he looked up at the materials he worked with, not down. The problem so many postmodern composers have is that they’re actually very distant from their own materials – they do not know how to listen to the sounds that they’re using.

What I want to examine here is the way in which Bartók has been seen as representing a postmodern alternative to the modernist compositional dichotomy represented by dodecaphony and neo-classicism. Morton Feldman was alluding to this notion when he told the composer Peter Gena, “Cage created a problem by showing that there was something other than either serialism or Stravinsky or the few jokers in the deck – you know, like Bartók and Hindemith. There are only a few jokers. That’s all.”

And the reason jokers are necessary is because the classical tradition has a long and tiresome history of dualistic thinking, whereby people become obliged to subscribe to one of two alternatives. You see it very plainly in the second half of the 19th century, when music-lovers actually were expected to make a choice between Wagner and Verdi, or Brahms and Bruckner. Today no opera- or symphony-lover, much less any musician or composer, has that idea anymore. One might not have the same regard for Wagner and Verdi, or Brahms and Bruckner, but except for the few folks who invariably seem rather provincial in their tastes, no one now thinks they’re obliged to choose.

From an inclusive postmodern perspective, that obligation is unreal. But this dualistic mentality still characterized the music scene for most of the 20th century, when neo-classicism became the modernist option for composers who rejected atonality. John Cage summed it up: “When I was young, you had either to follow Stravinsky or Schoenberg. There was no alternative. There was nothing else to do. You could perhaps have felt that you could follow Bartók, or you could have translated that Bartók into Cowell or Ives, but we didn’t think that way then. We thought Schoenberg or Stravinsky, and the schools certainly felt that way.”

Cage studied with Cowell in the 1930s, yet he too still shared that narrow perspective back then. In 1955 Cowell and his wife Sidney published the book Charles Ives and His Music, in which they pointed to this alternative: “Ives can, in fact, be shown to be one of the four great creative figures in music of the first half of the twentieth century. The others are Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók. No composer has escaped the influences of the first two – influences that seem now fairly fully assimilated. Bartók and Ives, on the other hand, stand for something new whose power is only beginning to be felt, and which undoubtedly has many years to run. Both men went back deliberately into unsophisticated music to explore and then carry forward aspects of musical behavior that had gone unnoticed or had been abandoned by the 18th- and 19th-century composers who established the symphonic music of the Western world. Bartók’s source was the folk music of Central Europe and the Near East. Ives’s music had its roots in the church, stage, parlor, and dance music of a small American town – the popular music of his time, in short.”

Cowell, as usual, was ahead of the curve – the 1950s and ‘60s would still remain mostly fixated on the official alternatives of Schoenberg and Stravinsky (even as Stravinsky morphed into a serial composer). In 1979 Frederic Rzewski – composer and improvising pianist, co-founder of MEV – really hit the nail on the head about this connection between Bartók and Ives: “Because of the peculiar tenacity of the folk tune or religious song – its stubborn refusal to give up its identity, in spite of the disintegrating force applied to it – it becomes possible to achieve a peculiar dimension of depth, or distance, in a way not possible in, say, formal serial music, which abjures the use of folk- or other non-formalized material. Such procedures fell out of fashion during the 1950s and early 1960s. Only in recent years have composers begun once again to resume experimentation in a field in which pioneering work was done in the first half of the century by Ives and Bartók.”

Postmodern composers seem to have a penchant for combining those names: Bartók, Ives, Cowell – usually adding Varèse as well. Bartók keeps being regarded and understood in connection with these ultramodern American composers. In his 1975 book Mind Models, Roger Reynolds said: “Only a broadly conceived and constantly modified definition of ‘beauty’ or ‘appeal’ could be said to apply to much of the most meaningful sonic art of this century. The mature work of Varèse, penetrating, insistent, often raucous; the percussive, brittle music of Bartók’s middle age; or the sometimes glorious cacophony of Ives’s multiple processes, stretching the confines of expectation within accepted styles and pitting one stream of ‘sense’ against another: These are not considered ‘art’ by virtue of any clear relation to beauty or by appeal in any usual sense. […] These composers took the accelerating accumulation of materials and banged them into often corrosive and apparently unruly shapes that had the evident merit of at least providing containment. Their works offered and still offer public evidence of personal acts of courage and selective accumulation – models, questions, statements for us all. What were the intentions of these artists? Not, one would think, a desire to ‘appeal’ in any direct way. By contrast, the artisan who traffics in local commerce is obliged to court the individual.”

Earlier I mentioned the composer William Duckworth – who, sadly, just passed away in 2012. He interviewed Meredith Monk for his 1995 book Talking Music, and when he asked her which composers had “made the biggest impression” on her, she replied, “Henry Cowell was one person, Stravinsky, and Bartók; I loved the Mikrokosmos. Those three really made a big difference to me at that time” – which would have been the early 1960s.

George Crumb has said of his early scores, “I was writing à la Bartók. This would have been the early 1950s. The Bartók style was at that time very strong in the States, and next to that Webern. I must say that, even today, I feel so much rapport with Bartók. [… C]omposers like Bartók, Mahler, and Ives. Those were the composers that interested me because they were facing the very problems that we are facing today – that is, how to pull a variety of musics into one music.” That was from an interview Crumb gave sometime in the mid ‘90s. In 1975 he told Tracy Caras and myself, for our book Soundpieces, “The major influences on my music would be Debussy, Ives to a certain extent, Varèse a little bit, Bartók certainly.“

The microtonal composer Ben Johnston, whose teachers included John Cage and Harry Partch, wrote in 1969 about the use of microtonal scales, “Composers of the early 20th century employed such scales for a variety of reasons. For Charles Ives, such scale expansion was a way to get closer to sounds he heard in his environment – for instance, bells. For Béla Bartók, these scales were a means of approximating Eastern European and Asiatic folk usages of pitch.” Speaking to Bill Duckworth in 1983, Johnston expanded on this idea, discussing equal-tempered music that employed just intonation intervals: “[T]he way to get the immediacy of the moment – the way to get the instantaneous effect of light – was to blend pure colors together. […] In Russia, it was Scriabin. In France, more than Ravel (who was something of a neo-classicist in his thinking), it was Debussy. In America, it was Ives. The last works that Ives dealt with before he stopped writing were the quarter-tone impressions for piano. And all his sketches for his Universe Symphony show that he was thinking in terms of acoustical pitch relations. [… T]he reason for Debussy’s chords – the logic behind these chords – was that they approximated the higher reaches of the overtone series.” This is true of Scriabin as well. “Furthermore, you get an actual formulation of that in America by Henry Cowell.”

When Duckworth responded, “Cowell had a background of world music to draw from,” Johnston added, “Of course he did, and that, in fact, is the other aspect of it. It’s the ethnomusicological aspect, you might say. Bartók. And Carrillo in Mexico.”

George Crumb mentioned the simultaneous enthusiasms for Bartók and Webern in the early 1950s – that combination was very special to several of the minimalist composers. Morton Feldman’s interest in Webern is well known; but there is also Feldman’s First Piano Sonata, written in 1943 when he was seventeen, which he dedicated to Béla Bartók – who, like Feldman, was then living in New York. And the piece shares in some of the sound world of the central slow movement of Bartók’s Sonata for Piano.

La Monte Young told Bill Duckworth that he first heard Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra in the mid ‘50s, when he was in high school, and it “just knocked me out. That was, I think, my first big taste of modern music. I just thought that was fantastic! […] Bartók inspired me before I discovered Webern. About a year before, in 1955, I wrote a quartet in the style of Bartók, Variations for String Quartet, which is one of the first compositions that I consider a composition. So I was very inspired by Bartók and then even more inspired by Webern as is evidenced in my Five Small Pieces for String Quartet.”

Steve Reich has said that his first scores were “somewhere between the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Quartets [of Béla Bartók and] the Webern of Opus 5.” But Reich has also said that those same Bartók quartets helped shape his Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ, composed in 1973. In 1980 Reich told Tracy Caras and myself, “I had been drawn to a certain chord form; a series of fifths in both hands. This is the opening chord form of the second movement of the Second Piano Concerto by Béla Bartók. This kind of chord structure – three fifths in the left hand and three fifths in the right – I found in a song I wrote for Hall Overton in 1957. It’s also Violin Phase […] I knew that Bartók had used this, and I just zeroed in on that one page of his.” He told us that it’s also in his Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards of 1979: “I don’t think anyone heard the piece as derivative of Bartók, but if you listen to just the string part, there is an influence there. I don’t think I would have written it that way if I hadn’t taken the time off to study that page of Bartók’s.”

Reich has also spoken about his Triple Quartet from 1999 in terms of Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet: “The third movement of my quartet begins as a result of the fifth movement of the Fourth Quartet. You know, the cellos doing all that offbeat stuff. Now, Bartók can get more going in one string quartet than I can with three, but nevertheless, I was saying to myself when I wrote this, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to keep that energy going?’ The fifth movement of the Fourth Quartet is definitely the starting point for Triple Quartet. I didn’t use any of Bartók’s notes, but I tried to keep that kind of energy going.”

Philip Glass’s father owned a record store in Baltimore and he was keen for Bartók and Shostakovich, so his son grew up hearing that music a lot. Glass said in particular that the LPs of the Juilliard Quartet playing the Bartók cycle “made a big impression on me.”

The six quartets also did the same for the teenage Christian Wolff, right around the same time: “The Bartók Quartets […] impressed me very much. Bartók was actually more like the sound in my mind than Schoenberg or Webern.” Wolff told Frank Oteri, “My background originally was very straight, very heavy classical – sort of Bach to Brahms, no exceptions. And nothing after … I mean, I hated modern music when I was a kid. I couldn’t stand it. And I had sort of a conversion when I was about 14 years old when I heard, for the first time I heard some Bartók. [… T]he six string quartets got their first New York performance played in a room by the Juilliard String Quartet.”

The later generations of American postmodern composer/musicians have continued this enthusiasm for Bartók, especially among the improvisers. “Blue” Gene Tyranny wrote for the first edition of the All Music Guide, “Bartók was a 20th-century original who showed how superb intellectual effort (he invented a composition system using Golden Sections, the Fibonnacci series, and quasi-serial techniques) and great passion (as can be seen in his in-depth studies of the Hungarian folk music, the ‘night music’ expressionist social tension between the wars, and his own life as a forced émigré) can combine to make great art. […] The first movement [of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta] is a completely new idea about the fugue form. It slowly and mysteriously winds along new tonal principles until a place of revelation is reached […] A breakthrough composition.”

In her 1979 LP Solo Violin Improvisations, Polly Bradfield listed as her musical inspirations Bartók, Ives, and Ligeti, along with Paganini and several jazz and folk violinists. In the ’90s the composer and accordionist Guy Klucevsek wrote the solo Three Microids, which he called “my tribute to Bartók.” His 21st-century follow-up, Return of the Microids, includes a piece he called “Ala Béla.” Klucevsek was drawing inspiration from Mikrokosmos, as did John Zorn. Zorn’s 1991 piano piece Carny at one point has the pianist playing Stockhausen in the left hand – a recurring chord from Klavierstück IX – and Bartók in the right, the ostinato from Ostinato in the last volume of Mikrokosmos. Both are heard at their original pitch, and their pitch materials are similar too, based on tritones. (Stockhausen, by the way, had studied Bartók’s music during the late 1940s, with the Swiss composer Frank Martin; in fact, Stockhausen’s paper for his civil-service teaching exam was on Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.) Zorn’s 1988 string quartet Cat O’ Nine Tails also made sure to include some Bartók: He reinvented a measure from the Fourth Quartet, reversing the meters of the cello and viola; he also changed the two violins from the original unison plucked F and G (in that snap pizzicato of Bartók’s, where the string hits the fingerboard). Zorn turned them into a cluster chord: F-G, first violin; F#-G#, second.

Bartók also turns up even more explicitly with Frank Zappa, whose devotion to Varése is well documented. But on one of Zappa’s last releases before his death in 1993, the double-LP Make a Jazz Noise Here, there is a brief arrangement entitled “Theme from Bartók Piano Concerto #3.” (There’s also a short arrangement from Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat.) Zappa was very devoted to Bartók and the Third Concerto. Nigey Lennon recalled in her memoir of Zappa that he played this concerto for her and said, ”The first time I heard the main melody in the first movement of this thing, I almost (now don’t laugh) cried.” Back in 1967, Zappa had written for Hit Parader‘s “My Favorite Records,” “You ought to get Bartók’s first, second, and third piano concertos, which are all very groovy and good to dance to.” It’s so true!

Outroduction

There’s a story from Bartók’s final years in the States, of how a fellow Hungarian émigré could not comprehend that Bartók had no reputation in America and blurted out to him, “[Y]ou are Bartók Béla!”, using the formal Hungarian convention for his name. And Bartók said to him, “I am not Bartók Béla here, I am only Bela Bartok.”

He had come to America as a flight from destruction, but it was also a fall from grace, the descent from “Bartók Béla” to “Bela Bartok.” After his arrival in America, he went into a depression that silenced him for more than two years. Yet here was where his music ultimately flourished, first in a late cumulative phase in his composition, which produced a series of masterpieces, and then posthumously with the ascent of his reputation. Which is one more indication that the New World was actually far closer to his musical sensibilities than the Old World had been.

Not that it felt that way while he was here, of course. But no matter how isolated and alienated he may have been in America, no matter what was lost to him in terms of reputation or colleagues or homeland or happiness, he also had something to fall back upon which was unique in its sound, its vitality, its emotional depth, its kineticism, its experience of humanity, its structural integrity, its “intense purity of feeling.” Having something like that is more than any kind of solace, it is a unity with foundational things. And the tree with the strongest and deepest roots thrives.

Elliott Carter recalled for the music critic Paul Griffiths that he had once attended a party in New York – this would have to be the early 1940s – and Bartók was there and he played the piano. “It was hot, so somebody opened a window, and the street noise made it almost impossible to hear anything, but Bartók went on as if nothing had happened.”

(This lecture was first given at the California Institute of the Arts in April of 2014.)

SOURCES

I. Early Modernism

“Oh, this must be rearranged”

Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music. ed. Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleeve. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 161.

“Not my invention”

http://www.erikchisholm.com/writings3.php

“And I was with him”

Perlis and Van Cleeve, p. 162.

“one of the most serious”

Joel Sachs, Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 189.

“pleroma,”

“Béla Bartók gave a great deal”

Dane Rudhyar, The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music. Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala, 1982, pp. 139, 103n.

“There seems to be a growing feeling”

George Crumb, “Music: Does It Have a Future?,” in: George Crumb: Profile of a Composer, ed. Don Gillespie. New York: C.F. Peters, 1986, p. 18.

“pitch polarity”

Nicole V. Gagné and Tracy Caras, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, New Jersey, 1982, p. 184.

“I had been warned”

Nicolas Slonimsky: Perfect Pitch. New York: Schirmer, 2002, pp. 116-17.

“He is as great a master”

Henry Cowell, “Music,” in: The Americana Annual: An Encyclopedia of Current Events, ed. Al H. McDannald. New York: Americana Corp., 1928, p. 545.

“New loveliness was revealed”

Henry Cowell, “Music,” in: The Americana Annual: An Encyclopedia of Current Events, ed. Al H. McDannald. New York: Americana Corp., 1929, p. 502.

“extreme in its finesse”

Claude Kenneson, Székely and Bartók: The Story of a Friendship. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1994, p. 107.

“the pulse of the universe’s life beat”

Charles E. Ives, Charles E. Ives: Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick. New York: Norton, 1972, p. 107.

“described the opening of the Sonata”

Roy Howat, “Masterworks (II): Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion,” in: The Bartók Companion, ed. Malcolm Gillies. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1994, p. 317.

“Bartók intended that”

Kenneson, Székely and Bartók, p. 205.

“The Hard Hats Quartet of Toronto”

http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/spaced-out-with-henry-brant/

“like ordinary music just a little off”

Musical America, 01/10/1925.

“I recognize only half-tones”

Prager Presse, 02/23/1930.

“liked tremendously”

“very fine”

“glissandos on the strings”

Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 142.

“Childlike he showed me”

Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger, p. 163.

“freed me from the tyrannical rule”

Joseph Machlis, Introduction To Contemporary Music. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 187.

“The crux of my letter”

Susan Hawkshaw, “A Master of the American Opera,” in: Columbia Magazine, Spring 2002.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Spring2002/Beeson.html

“Royalties from performances of his works”

Claire R. Reis, Composers Conductors and Critics. Detroit, Michigan: Detroit Reprints in Music, 1974, p. 191.

“I never liked his music anyway”

“regrettably, rings true”

Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978, p. 648.

“Meanwhile one seeks in vain”

Ned Rorem, “Bluebeard and Erwartung: A Notebook,” in: Other Entertainment, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 261.

“One of the most important things”

Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948-1971. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972, p. 407.

“the central section of Jocasta’s air”

Rorem, “Bluebeard and Erwartung: A Notebook,” p. 261.

“In the event that Les noces is included”

Stravinsky and Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, p. 648.

“I met him at least twice”

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations With Igor Stravinsky. London: Faber and Faber, 1958, p. 74.

“All peasant music deeply interests me”

M.Ö., “A Conversation with Béla Bartók,” in: Bartók and His World, ed. Peter Laki. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 237.

“Scottish folk music, and especially piobaireachd”

http://www.erikschisholm.com/writings3.php

“Bartók was incorporating the Chleu material”

Paul Bowles, Without Stopping. New York: Ecco Press, 1972, p. 191.

“a Chaabiya Souassa song”

Gena Dagel Caponi, Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage. Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994, p. 73.

“were the only musicians present”

Fernand Ouellette, Edgard Varèse. New York: Orion Press, 1968, p. 161.

“I said to the class”

Deena Rosenberg and Bernard Rosenberg, The Music Makers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, p. 68.

“a work in his own idiom”

Ezra Pound, “Mostly Quartets,” in Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer. London: Faber & Faber, p. 403.

“profoundly impressed,” “which he was afterward often to say”

Schafer, Ezra Pound and Music, p. 400.

“and Bartók has left us”

Ezra Pound, “Canto LXXXIV,” in: The Pisan Cantos, ed. Richard Sieburth. New York: New Directions, 2003, p. 116.

“a six-by-six-foot steel cage”

Sieburth, Introduction to The Pisan Cantos, p. xiii.

“If the hoar frost grip thy tent”

Pound, “Canto LXXXIV,” p. 118.

“in Germany between 1937 and 1941”

János Breuer, “Bartók and the Third Reich,” in: The Hungarian Quarterly, Winter 1995.

“Hungary as a Communist country”

Richard Dufallo, Trackings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 327-328.

“No other musician of our century”

Virgil Thomson, Music Reviewed, 1940-1954. New York: Vintage Books, 1967, p. 274.

“Music of passionate and personal expressivity”

“Its presence in Bruckner and Mahler”

“Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner,” “Sincerity is not”

Thomson, Music Reviewed, 1940-1954, p. 235.

“reminded hearers”

“believes that he is”

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,854320,00.html

“In recent years I have considerably”

Halsey Stevens, The Life and Music of Béla Bartók. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 232.

“I wanted to show Schoenberg”

Yehudi Menuhin and Curtis W. Davis, The Music of Man. New York: Methuen, 1979, p. 311.

“analyze the first movement’s motivic structure”

Sabine Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 220.

“inadequate and pedantic”

Arnold Schoenberg, “On Notation” in Style and Idea. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975, p. 351 (emphases Schonberg’s).

“Folk music gave Schoenberg”

Hanns Eisler: A Miscellaney, ed. David Blake. Luxembourg: Harwood, 1995, p. 175.

“I consider Bartók has”

“Alban Berg” in Bartók Remembered. ed. Malcolm Gillies. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990, p. 223.

“Although he knew the music”

“It is too cacophonous”

“Evidently, Webern’s aural sensibilities”

Hans Moldenhauer and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of his Life and Work. New York: Knopf, 1979, p. 465.

II. Late Modernism

“one of many integrative methods”

“a thorough awareness”

“a total and personally unique solution”

“basic unity of purpose”

“Bartók’s concern for the total composition”

Milton Babbitt, “The String Quartets of Bartók,” in: The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen Peles. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 1, 2, 6.

“an organic chromaticism”

“a wholly personal”

Pierre Boulez, Orientations. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 346, 348.

“Bartók’s art remains an island,”

Peter Yates, Twentieth Century Music. New York: Pantheon, 1967, p. 182

“In my opinion, the effects of peasant music”

Béla Bartók, “The Influence Of Peasant Music On Modern Music,” in: Contemporary Composers On Contemporary Music, ed. Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967, p. 73.

“The possibilities opened up”

Donald Mitchell, The Language of Modern Music. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970, pp. 108-109.

“I was completely overwhelmed”

Ross Lee Finney, Profile of a Lifetime: A Musical Autobiography. New York: C.F. Peters Corp, 1992, pp. 38-39.

“an exquisite little work”

Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 Through 1942. New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984, p. 84.

“Nothing could be more characteristically”

Aaron Copland, Copland on Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976, p. 187.

“detailed questionnaire”

“he divided ‘modern music’”

“Nadia was incensed”

“By saying nothing”

Léonie Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music. New York: Norton, 1982, pp. 177-178.

“Bartók’s work is the finest”

“has much greater clarity”

Elliott Carter, “Opening Notes, New York, 1937,” in: The Writings of Elliott Carter, ed. Else Stone and Kurt Stone. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1977, p. 16.

“Bartók, whose Fourth Quartet”

Dörte Schmidt, “’I try to write music that will appear to an intelligent listener’s ear.’ On Elliott Carter’s String Quartets,” in: Elliott Carter Studies, ed. Maguerite Boland and John Link. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 172, Footnote 14.

“I sometimes wanted to write”

Gagné and Caras, Soundpieces, p. 93.

“The things that were being played”

William Duckworth, Talking Music. New York: Schirmer Books, 1995, p. 34.

“No one who knew his music”

Copland, Copland on Music, p. 46.

III. Jazz

“the latest things in American jazz”

Musical America, 12/31/1927.

“He finds that the Jazz band”

Musical Leader, 01/12/1928.

“Very much in the style of Gershwin”

Howard Pollack, George Gershwin: His Life and Work. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2006, p. 146.

“Excuse me, Mr. Bartók”

Edward Alexander, “Béla Bartók – A Memoir,” in: The Hungarian Quarterly, Summer 2003, vol. XLIII, no. 170.

“might surprise some of our listeners”

“modern classics”

“one of the most finished and accomplished”

http://www.geocities.com/ladenso1/Bird/BirdKLON14pt2.html

“The first time I heard”

Nat Hentoff, “Sweet Land of Liberty” in The Daily Advocate, 01/01/2014

http://www.dailyadvocate.com/news/editorials/3267512/Lifelong-supports-I-learned-from-jazz-masters-beyond-music?template=art_smartphone

“What you hear depends on”

Brian Priestly, Chasin’ The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 96.

“The blues feeling is part of jazz”

Valerie Wilmer, Jazz People. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970, p. 121.
“the Hungarian counterpart”

Ross Firestone, Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman. New York: Norton, 1993, p. 248.

“One day at rehearsal”

Firestone, Swing, Swing, Swing, p. 250.

“like meeting God”

“Young man, listen to Palestrina”

Eddie Sauter, interview by Bill Kirchner, 08/11/1980, transcript, National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Oral History Project (JOHP), Institute of Jazz Studies, Newark, N.J., p. 161.

“Within their respective cultures”

Marty Ehrlich & Greg Osby: In Traning

IV. Postmodernism

“Cage created a problem”

Peter Gena, “H.C.E. (Here Comes Everybody),” in: TriQuarterly, no. 54, Spring 1982, p. 128.

“When I was young”

David Cope, “An Interview With John Cage,” in: Composer Magazine 10-11, 1980.

“Ives can, in fact, be shown”

Henry and Sidney Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955, p. 4.

“Because of the peculiar tenacity”

Frederic Rzewski, “Melody As Face: On the Interpretation of Received Phenomena,” in: Nonsequiturs: Writings and Lectures on Improvisation, Composition, and Interpretation. Cologne: MusikTexte, 2007, p. 138.

“Only a broadly conceived”

Roger Reynolds, Mind Models: New Forms Of Musical Experience. New York: Praeger, 1975, pp. 24-25.

“made the biggest impression”

“Henry Cowell was one person”

Duckworth, Talking Music, p. 351.

“I was writing à la Bartók”

Geoff Smith and Nicola Walker Smith, New Voices: American Composers Talk about Their Music. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1995, pp. 95-96.

“The major influences on my music”

Gagné and Caras, Soundpieces, p. 120.

“Composers of the early 20th century”

Ben Johnston: “Microtonal Resources,” in: Maximum Clarity and Other Writings on Music, ed. Bob Gilmore. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2006, pp. 41-42.

“The way to get the immediacy”

“Furthermore, you get”

“Cowell had a background”

“Of course he did”

Duckworth, Talking Music, p. 128.

“just knocked me out”

Duckworth, Talking Music, pp. 224-225.

“somewhere between the Third”

Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 156.

“I had been drawn”

“I don’t think anyone heard”

Gagné and Caras, Soundpieces, p. 310.

“The third movement of my quartet”

http://www.stevereich.com/articles/NY-VT.html

“made a big impression on me”

http://music.barnesandnoble.com/features/interview.asp?NID=115610&z=y

“The Bartók Quartets”

Cues: Writings and Conversations, ed. Gisela Gronemeyer and Reinhard Oehlschlägel. Köln: Edition MusikTexte, 1998, p. 88.

“My background originally”

Click to access interview_wolff.pdf

“Bartók was a 20th-century original”

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, “Béla Bartók,” in: All Music Guide, ed. Scott Bultman and Michael Erlewine. San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 1992, p. 628.

“my tribute to Bartók”

http://www.starkland.com/st207/

”The first time I heard the main melody”

Nigey Lennon, Being Frank – My Time With Frank Zappa. Los Angeles: California Classic Books, 1995, p. 103.

“You ought to get”

http://wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/My_Favorite_Records

Outroduction

“You are Bartók Béla,”

“I am not Bartók Béla”

Agatha Fassett, The Naked Face of Genius: Béla Bartók’s Last Years. London: Victor Gollancz, 1970, p. 20.

“It was hot”

Elliott Carter

Link to:

Music: Lectures: Contents

For more on these composers, see:

Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition

Music Book: Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers

For more on Milton Babbitt, see:

Music: Radio Show #35, Electro-Acoustic Music, part 3: Musicians and Synthesized Sound

For more on Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern, see:

Music: Radio Show #27, 20th-Century Music on the March

For more on Béla Bartók and Edgard Varèse, see:

Music: Radio Show #10, Percussion in Early 20th-Century Music

For more on Alban Berg, Nadia Boulanger, Ross Lee Finney, and Roger Sessions, see:

Music: Radio Show #28, Ross Lee Finney and His Teachers

For more on Alban Berg and Anton Webern, see:

Music: Radio Show #24, The Second Viennese School: Alban Berg and Anton Webern

For more on Pierre Boulez, see:

Music: Radio Show #18, Gunther Schuller and Pierre Boulez at 90

For more on Paul Bowles, John Cage, Elliott Carter, and Igor Stravinsky, see:

Music: Radio Show #22, Neo-Classicism, part 3

For more on John Cage, see:

Music Book: Sonic Transports – Glenn Branca essay, part 1

Music Essay: The Beaten Path: A History of American Percussion Music

Music: Radio Show #4, Postmodernism, part 1: Three Founders

For more on John Cage and Henry Cowell, see:

Music: Radio Show #19, The Percussion Ensemble

For more on John Cage, Henry Cowell, Conlon Nancarrow, Edgard Varèse, and La Monte Young, see:

Music Lecture: The Secret of 20th-Century American Music

For more on John Cage, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young, see:

Film Review: Prism’s Colors, The Mechanics of Time

For more on John Cage and Ruth Crawford Seeger, see:

Music: Radio Show #8, Daoism in Western Music, part 1

For more on John Cage and Arnold Schoenberg, see:

Music: Radio Show #25, Schoenberg in America

For more on John Cage and Edgard Varèse, see:

Music Radio Show #29, Electro-Acoustic Music, part 1: New Instruments

For more on Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, and Virgil Thomson, see:

Music: Radio Show #21, Neo-Classicism, part 2

For more on Henry Cowell and Ezra Pound, see:

Music: Radio Show #16, John J. Becker and the American Five Plus One

For more on Morton Feldman and Edgard Varèse, see:

Music: Radio Show #33: Electro-Acoustic Music, part 2: Musicians and Tape

For more on Morton Feldman and La Monte Young, see:

Music: Radio Show #5, Minimalism

For more on Philip Glass, see:

Film Interview: Rudolph Wurlitzer

For more on Philip Glass and Steve Reich, see:

Music: Radio Show #32, Riley, Reich, and Glass

For more on Conlon Nancarrow, see:

Film Fiction – Film Dream #13: Luis Buñuel

Music Essay: Conlon Nancarrow

Music Lecture: My Experiences of Surrealism in 20th-Century American Music

Music: Radio Show #26, Surrealism in 20th-Century American Music

For more on Ned Rorem, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young, see:

Music Book: Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers

For more on Arnold Schoenberg, see:

Music: Radio Show #23, A Tribute to Arnold Schoenberg

And be sure to read Sabine Feisst’s book Schoenberg’s New World

For more on Igor Stravinsky, see:

Music: Radio Show #20, Neo-Classicism, part 1

For more on “Blue” Gene Tyranny, see:

AGAMEMNON – The Opera

Music Book: Sonic Transports

Music Essay: You Can Always Go Downtown

Music Essay: 88 Keys to Freedom: Segues Through the History of American Piano Music by “Blue” Gene Tyranny

And be sure to read David Bernabo’s book Just for the Record: Conversations with and about “Blue” Gene Tyranny

For more on Edgard Varèse, see:

Music Book: SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Essay, part 9

For more on La Monte Young, see:

Music: Radio Show #31, A Tribute to La Monte Young