Just listen to the opening four minutes. If you're not hooked you need a drug stronger than music....
So after one guy kept bugging me about doing underrated music by well-known composers and wouldn't take no for an answer, I decided to do an experiment is that on the first three days of the month, that's exactly what we're going to do. And now this guy seems to be nowhere to be found....
So here is one of my favorite pieces of music in the world, The Wooden Prince, a ballet by Bartok that conveys Bartok at his essence: simultaneously modern and ancient. Bartok does not, as Stravinsky does, reach back into ancient history and update it for the present. Bartok reaches back to a prehistory so ancient that we can only speculate its essence, and updates it into a future so distant that we have barely begun to speculate its properties. Stravinsky’s music is full of ‘intentional wrong notes’ and chords, but the notes are so clearly wrong that they operate by a harmonic framework Bach would recognize. Not so Bartok, and if you’d never heard Eastern European folk music, you’d think Bartok invented his own tonality.
Bartok can only be understood through the oral musical traditions who surrounded him. His music may seem ultramodern, but it is so old in spirit that it predates history itself. No amount of reading on wikipedia can give you a way into Bartok’s music – it has to be experienced to be appreciated. At the beginning of his career, Stravinsky made immersions in the oral traditions of Russia as Bartok immersed himself into the Balkans; but the ever schematic Stravinsky turned so many Russian and Ukranian folk songs into something antithetical to their spirit, copying their notations out from books assembled by other musicologists so he could put ultramodern spins on the ancient.
Bartok was incapable of any such apathy to folk roots. His modernism is grounded in fidelity to ancient traditions. He notated the music of folk songs as closely as possible to the way the musicians played them, and from the folk music he recorded so precisely, he created music that is an expands upon the spirit of their inspiration. Stravinsky takes us well into the past, but Bartok takes us into eternity. Stravinsky always winks to us that he is truly a musician of the here and now, Bartok tells us that the here and now is an illusion.
And this is why I suspect that Bartok still keeps his face half hidden from us. We are still not global enough a world; too monoglot, too uncomprehending of music and art outside our traditions, still not respectful enough of the other cultures and social classes who live amongst us, and our scientific age is completely uncomprehending of any aspect of the humanities that cannot be quantified. We are still generations away from a true reckoning with Bartok.
To the average American who is not exactly seventy-three, folk music seems like a drudge. But Hungarian/Gypsy folk music is folk music as you’ve never heard it – completely out of place with hippies in an American coffeeshop. Like Indian Classical Music, African Drumming, or Javanese Gamelan Music, this is music with facets so incredibly complex that one has to wonder if any composer in the West ever caught up to it. And yet, unlike the ancient musical traditions of East Asia, this is truly folk music, a popular music of the people.
And it is from this soil of southeastern Europe that Bartok grows these unique sequoias and poplars. I use this purple prosed metaphor because Bartok’s music sounds as though it comes from the wild, subject to forces so complex no applied science can quantify them.
Again and again, Bartok went on his rural trips to through the Carpathian Mountains and Basin, recording the music of Hungarians, Slovakians, Romanians, Transylvanians, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Wallachians, going even further afield to record Greeks and Turks and Algerians. If you spent decades of your life collecting folk music obsessively, you’d have a completely unique musical perspective too.
To an exponential level beyond any before him (and nearly any after), Bartok operates by a different frame of reference. There’s no mistaking his music for anything but tonality (with a very few exceptions…), but normal rules of harmony don’t apply here. To do s Bartok does, you need vast experience with alternate scales, tunings, rhythms, exactly the sort of training few classical musicians get.
Generally speaking, if you play something different than classical music in the West, you’re playing jazz and rock, which still operates in the same world of Western harmony and rhythm. Bartok, on the other hand, learned the music of the Balkans, a landscape dominated by the world of the Roma (or Gypsies as they’re more commonly known). The Romani people hailed originally from Northern India. It’s impossible not to hear vague echoes of Indian ragas. Along the way to Eastern Europe, they passed through Arab countries. Many lived under Muslim Caliphates. under Byzantium, under the Ottoman Empire, and many lived under the moors of Northern Africa and Spain. The larger Western World, with all its alternate perspectives, is bound into the Romani experience, and therefore in the experience of Romani music.
The Hungarians, speaking a language completely unrelated to any European language until you get as far afield as Finland, are truer than any other European peoples to their pre-historic roots, and there have so little need for high arts when their folk arts are so incredibly wonderful. Compare just one minute of Hungarian or Gypsy folk music to its German equivalent, and you understand why classical music reached its apogee in Germany rather than Hungary. Hungarian/Gypsy folk music is so fascinatingly rich and perfect, German folk music sucks. Look at Magyar/Romani dancing, look at traditional Hungarian costume and embroidery, listen to the fascinating complexity of Hungarian folk tales. These are traditions that were fully modern millennia before modernity, all of it existing since time immemorial as a civilization that needs no modernity to make it more sophisticated. Had modernity not interrupted Hungary so rudely, they could probably keep existing and evolving into an infinite future, accumulating the new flavors of its surrounding environs with every generation; having already been positioned historically and geographically to accumulate influences Germanic, Latin, Slavic, Arabic, Central Asian, and Indian into their own unique cultural voice over a period of millennia. Shall we as a species ever have anything like Bartok’s humility before a natural evolution too complicated for us to ever understand? Have we been spoiled by living apart from the land? Have we ruined the natural evolution of the world by ignoring it?
And this is what The Wooden Prince is about. The plot, like most ballets, is incredibly simple: a human prince falls in love with a princess, who is in love with a 'wooden prince' who comes to life and seduces the princess with the miracle of his being brought to life. A fairy takes pity on the prince's unrequited love, and brings the 'Wooden Prince' to his natural, wooden state, and dresses the Prince in better finery so that he may seduce the princess himself.
In such simple stories amid such powerful music, a wooden prince is surely a metaphor for something. So much of Bartok's music imitates the sounds of nature, often with breathtaking realism. I believe The Wooden Prince is, both the character and the work itself, a metaphor for nature itself, awesome, dangerous, terrific, its destructive capability being precisely what can often make it beautiful, and always capable of transformations we'd never thought possible unless we saw them with our own eyes. In our rationalist, scientific age, it would seem that we've mapped every natural miracle, and yet, here may come the age of climate change, rising sea levels, more and more forceful hurricanes, mass fire, mass extinction, mass pandemics, in which nature works humanity's very ingenuity against itself. So long as we exist in nature, we will always wait and hope for some supernatural being to take pity on us.
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