Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T00:03:20.026Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2009

David Cooper
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
Get access

Summary

… this other music of today, the music of Bartók! Chaos in place of Cosmos, confusion in place of order, scattered clouds of aural sensation in place of clarity and shape, fortuitous proportions and a renunciation of architecture in place of structure and controlled development. Yet this too was masterly. Even beautiful, moving, sublime, wonderfully gifted! … And all the more beautiful and irresistible by virtue of its being precisely the music of our time: an expression of our experience, our view of life, our strengths and our weaknesses. It expresses us and our questionable life-styles while also affirming us. Like us, this music knows the beauty of dissonance and pain; the many scales of fractional and varied tones, the overthrow and relativization of morals and established modes of thought. No less than us does it know the yearning for the paradises of order and security, of logic and of harmony.

Hermann Hesse's diary-entry of 15 May 1955, in response to a radio broadcast that morning of the Concerto for Orchestra and a concerto grosso by Handel, captures the essence of Bartók's music, with its precarious tightrope balance between urban art music and rural popular music, tonality and atonality, chaos and order. The conventional musical analyst will probably reject Hesse's opinions of the structural fortuity of the work as the value judgement of an amateur. Yet Hesse's assessment avoids the tendency to normalize Bartók's music which is so prevalent among professional commentators today, albeit according to a number of different systems of analysis.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Introduction
  • David Cooper, University of Leeds
  • Book: Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra
  • Online publication: 24 November 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611667.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Introduction
  • David Cooper, University of Leeds
  • Book: Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra
  • Online publication: 24 November 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611667.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • David Cooper, University of Leeds
  • Book: Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra
  • Online publication: 24 November 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611667.001
Available formats
×