Bartok Perspectives: Man, Composer, and Ethnomusicologist (review)

Bartók Perspectives: Man, Composer, and Ethnomusicologist. Edited by Elliott Antokoletz, Victoria Fischer, and Benjamin Suchoff. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xvi, 316 p. ISBN 0-19-512562-2. $65.]

In his 1996 source-studies primer, László Somfai characterized the extant literature on Béla Bartók as the "disturbingly uncoordinated and controversial" product of a field grappling with many obstacles: an ideologically charged language divide, geographical separation of primary sources, isolation from the musicological mainstream, and an unwillingness to build on its own accomplishments (Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources [Berkeley: University of California Press], 1). Yet Bartók studies also waver under the burden of investment in a composer and a repertory required to perform cultural, national, political, philosophical, and ideological labor. Bartók, it seems, must always be, and do, something more. Thus when Somfai exhorts his colleagues to "do justice to Bartók, rather than Bartók scholarship, for the disadvantages of the past" (Somfai, 8), it is a dictum at once evident and elusive, a banality and a profound conundrum.

Five years later, Bartók Perspectives: Man, Composer, Ethnomusicologist brings together lectures from two international conferences (International Bartók Conference, Radford, Virginia, 6-9 April 1995; Bartók in Retrospect, International Symposium of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Los Angeles, California, 17-18 October 1995) to produce the first collection of Bartók essays in over five years. The book's editors have wisely positioned their project between its most recent predecessors, eschewing both the categorical exhaustiveness of The Bartók Companion (ed. Malcolm Gillies [London: Faber, 1993; Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 1994) and the quirky template of Bartók and His World (ed. Peter Laki, Bard Music Festival Series [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995]). Perspectives--echoing Somfai's edict--aspires to characterize Bartók and his biographers, analysts, and interpreters, seeking "a more integrated approach to the Bartók disciplines" and "a more coherent view of the Bartók field" (p. 3). But long before reaching Malcolm Gillies's concluding essay, "The Canonization of Béla Bartók," the reader will have sensed, as does Gillies, that the field's proliferative subcategories ultimately favor Bartók the composer over his other incarnations as ethnographer, pianist, national legacy, or person. Little surprise, then, that the elucidation of his compositional alchemy fuels the best of the book's articles, and specialists of whatever creed are most convincing when they marshal their unique skills to this shared project.

The "parsing out" of the constituent parts of Bartók's compositional language is one initiative that cuts across the book's sectional categories. Benjamin Suchoff's focus on the early symphonic poem Kossuth in "The Genesis of Bartók's Musical Language," for example, renews consideration of the Straussian and Lisztian influences on the younger composer, while Gillies's notational study ("Analyzing Bartók's Works of 1918-1922") recasts Bartók's mercurial attitude toward Igor Stravinsky as a projection of his own struggle to forge a viable post-tonal style. A new version of Carl S. Leafstedt's Duke Bluebeard's Castle materials reconstructs and reconsiders Bartók's exorcism of Claude Debussy's influence from the opera's preliminary versions. Placed in three separate sections (concerning aesthetics, analysis, and compositional process, respectively), these materials share the larger aim of assessing the resonances and inflections of Bartók's compositional language.

When the book's fourth section, "Folk Music Influences," tethers ethnomusicological concerns to the Bartók repertory, vital ideas emerge. János Kárpáti shrugs off an initially formulaic narrative style to distinguish Bartók's enlightened application of Arabian materials from his earlier orientalisms and primitivisms. David Yeomans likewise advances a viable analysis of the Romanian Christmas Carols but does not fully explore the work's use of vocal prototypes or its potentially pedagogical design. Yet it is Tim Rice's "Béla Bartók and Bulgarian Rhythm" that, despite exposing evidentiary and...