0.10 Appendix 1: musician biographies  (Page 4/37)

"The strands of his harmony are really concurrent melodies. They flow easily and expressively, never engross the hearer’s attention, but divide his interest as now one, now the other becomes prominent. The combination of several melodies obliges the composer to use devices which are unnecessary in homophonic music. A single melody can develop as it pleases. But when two or more are combined each must be so delicately and cleverly fashioned that it can be interwoven with the others in this direction and that."

There is considerable documentary evidence that Bach’s astonishing mastery of contrapuntal procedures was apparent not only in the works that survive in notation but in his ability to create complex polyphonic works extemporaneously. One famous incident occurred toward the end of his life when he was visiting his son, a musician at the court of the Prussian monarch Frederick the Great. Bach asked the king, who loved music and was a fairly accomplished flutist, to “give him a subject for a Fugue, in order to execute it immediately without any preparation. The King admired the learned manner in which his subject was thus executed extempore.” Upon returning to Leipzig, Bach wrote out a series of contrapuntal elaborations on the royal theme that demonstrate every aspect of the art of counterpoint and dedicated them to the king with the title “Musical Offering.”

Bach may have lived and worked in relative obscurity, but many of his contemporaries who achieved fame and celebrity during their lifetimes are now considered minor figures while Bach is regarded as one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time.

Bartok, bela (1881–1945)

Bela Bartok was born in an area of Hungary that is now the westernmost tip of Romania. He began piano lessons at age five and in 1899 was admitted to the Budapest Academy of Music to study piano and composition. After his graduation in 1903, he embarked on a career unusually wide-ranging in its scope and impact. He was a concertizing pianist; a teacher of piano and member of the faculty of the Budapest Academy of Music; an internationally known composer; and a pioneer in the study of Eastern European folk music. In the 1930s, Bartok was among the many intellectuals and artists who came under attack for their protests against fascism and in 1940 he emigrated to the United States, where he continued to perform, teach, compose, and pursue his ethnomusicological research until his death.

Ethnomusicology is the scientific study of music of oral tradition, encompassing tribal and folk music and the art music produced by various world cultures. The discipline, whose origins date back to the 1880s, draws on methodologies of musicology, the scholarly study of Western art music, and anthropology, whose subject is mankind and human culture. Throughout the history of Western music, art and folk music repertories have influenced and enriched each other. The conscious exploitation of folk materials was especially important among 19th-century composers involved in the nationalist movement, who sought to imbue their music with a folk flavor by incorporating folk-like elements and even quoting actual folk melodies. But to Bartok and other ethnomusicologists, folk music was not a source of exotic atmosphere but an expression of human culture worth documenting for its inherent value. Beginning in his early twenties, Bartok and his friend and fellow musician Zoltan Kodaly made numerous expeditions to remote parts of Hungary and neighboring Slavic regions, recording on wax cylinders thousands of peasant tunes. As recalled by one of the singers they recorded: