ISBN : 9782296550506
LISTENING TO BARTÓK
Julie Brown
In many respects reception of Bartók's music has settled into an orthodoxy, whereby long-established meanings, especially those considered to flow from Bartókian topoi, have come to form the basis of interpretation. The same is true to a considerable extent with his ethnomusicological project. In short, Bartók's project and Bartók's music can sometimes seem all-too legible. Provided you identify the topos, you have a key to meaning. Remembering that Bartók's activity was embedded in a very turbulent period of cultural history renders the cultural meaning of his music and overall project a little less transparent, however. Bartók developed his modernist composition style from a variety of sources and a rhetoric of "synthesis" often attaches to his musical language. With a handful of exceptions, the particular ethnic origin of the folk materials that he drew...