0.10 Appendix 1: musician biographies  (Page 5/37)

"I was a girl. It happened one Sunday…. The professors…asked my mother to receive them and to agree to my singing into the gramophone for them. They called the machine a ‘gramophone.’ I sang one nice verse, and then another one. It came back sounding so beautiful. The whole village gathered around us. The whole village. Everyone was wanting to sing. The young men sang, the old women sang…. I remember that the professors asked me not to sing songs we’d learned from the soldiers, but only those from the mountain region here. So I only sang ones from the mountains."

From these recordings, the music and text of the songs were notated, analyzed, and codified. Bartok’s published transcriptions of Twenty Hungarian Folksongs in 1906 was followed in 1908 by the first of his many musico-ethnological studies based upon his folk song research. He also composed numerous arrangements of folk songs—for piano, for voice and piano, for chorus—often publishing his settings alongside the notations of the tunes as recorded from the folk singers.

Bartok’s folk music studies were seminal in the formulation of a strikingly personal language in which compositional practices of art music are fused with melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic materials of Eastern European folk music. Bartok was himself conscious of this profound influence, which he acknowledged in his many lectures and writings about his research and experiences in the field of folk music. As described by a scholar of Bartok’s music:

"His music was nourished by his folkloristic studies while the scientific profited by the musician’s experience in both theoretical and practical issues. Viewing it from this angle Bartok was a very rare combination of scientist and artist….And Bartok himself considered his folk music research as entirely equal in importance to his creative activity as a composer."

That creative activity encompassed a broad range of musical genres—opera and ballet; orchestral, chamber, and solo piano works; songs and choral compositions. It is in the design and character of Bartok’s melodies, rhythms, textures, and harmonies that the influence of Eastern European folk music is most apparent. Bartok’s ethnographic music studies brought him in contact with melodies based on scales other than major and minor, which is evident in the modal flavor of many of his works. His use of irregular accents derives from the practice he encountered of grouping rhythms not into repeated patterns of two’s and three’s but into five’s, seven’s and other combinations of two’s and three’s. His textures reflect performance practices in many folk-music traditions that involve the addition of drone accompaniments and improvised countermelodies created through heterophony and parallel motion. And Bartok creates sonorities based on pitch combinations characteristic of Eastern European music in addition to those traditionally employed in Western classical music.

Beethoven, ludwig van (1770–1827)

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, an important intellectual and cultural center in Germany and the seat of a court that flourished with particular brilliance in the late 18th century. Beethoven’s father, a court musician, recognized his son’s unusual musical gifts and sought to exploit them to his own advantage. Yet despite his scheming, which included representing Beethoven as two years younger than he actually was, and despite the boy’s extraordinary talents, Beethoven never achieved wide acclaim as a child wonder as had Mozart a couple of decades earlier. Indeed, it was not until after Beethoven had permanently settled in Vienna in 1792 that he earned public recognition, initially as a virtuoso pianist, and later as a composer.