Bartok, my daddy
by Gabriela Lena Frank
This morning, while cleaning up an impressive puppy mess, I put on a recording of the complete string quartets of Bela Bartok. Anyone who knows me knows that Bartok is my daddy, and this album is special for having been recorded by longtime friends comprising the now disbanded Chiara String Quartet. It is a simply ravishing album, an aptly effective antidote to the more humbling moments of dog ownership. But as I was throwing away soiled paper towels, I felt twinges of unexpected and not altogether pleasant nostalgia: Released during the final months of the presidential election in 2016, the booklet notes, which I authored, reveal an uneasy spirit. At the time, we were all reacting to the gradual national descent into evermore divisive and degrading discourse that formed the unsettling backdrop to the release. What should have been a retrospective on a violent past was also an ominous foreshadowing of the four years since, and I wonder if I shall ever again be able to listen to Bartok's string quartets without feeling like I'm standing on the edge of a precipice.
I post below the notes to this wonderful CD for all interested, a CD whose message rings as urgently as ever.
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Bartok by Heart, recorded by the Chiara String Quartet; booklet notes by Gabriela Lena Frank
“I swear, Bartok must have been Latino in a previous life!”
Little did I know how prescient that utterance, made in jest after an exhilarating music coaching session in college, would be. The occasion was a study of Hungarian born composer Bela Bartok’s Contrasts for violin, clarinet, and piano (1938), a jewel of ethnic and cultural hybridity, inventive in its colorations, and virtuoso yet with utterly idiomatic acrobatics for each member of our trio. In the weeks leading up to our first coaching with a master musician, the genius of Bartok had, for me, been finding as its unlikely reference point my own roots in the small Andean nation of Perú. How well I remember thinking of Peruvian tinya drums when, in the opening of the Contrasts, I chiseled piano accents to decorate the clarinetist’s Hungarian military recruiting dance “verbunkos” melody. The generous pedaling of the middle movement’s episodic sections, strange and amorphous, reminded me of the reverberant highland harawi, an ancient and melancholy song of my Inca forbearers. In the finale, frenetic Bulgarian rhythms sparked into action by the violinist’s exotically mistuned strings conjured up memories of twangy vibrating charango guitars of Bolivia. Thus inspired by the startling discovery of kinship transcending continents, race, as well as generations, my first exposure to Bartok was dramatic and life changing. In 1992, I was a mixed-race American woman of Peruvian, Lithuanian, and Chinese heritage training to become a pianist and composer; and Bartok, with a single composition written more than fifty years earlier, had kicked to life an insistent moral imperative within me that would never be silenced.
Countless words have been written, of course, about this giant of twentieth century classical music, testifying to the impact of Bartok beyond that upon one young budding musician finding her way. It’s truly staggering to try to account for those who have defined their lives by Bartok’s compositional oeuvre, essays, teachings, and recordings: Theorists delight in identifying Bartok’s golden mean ratios and his intervallic pitch cells. Musicologists avidly study the historical context of Europe reeling from the advent of fascism and genocidal racism during the years of Bartok’s life, 1881 to 1945. Ethnomusicologists credit Bartok as a founding father, along with his comrade and colleague Zoltán Kodály, of a new academic discipline through his tireless documentation, even rescue, of folk music from countries like Hungary and Romania, and those that no longer exist like Ruthenia and Transylvania. Composers look to Bartok as a model of how to modernize and refresh traditions. Conductors marvel at his imaginative orchestrations. And performers? They might tear their hair out at the inherent difficulty in bringing to life Bartok’s scores but they also simultaneously revel and thrill in his technical and artistic demands. One cannot, after all, step into his world without subsequently becoming a more excellent musician and hence, the consummate storyteller.
For my own part, I found fellow admirers of Bartok among the members of the Chiara String Quartet quite early on. Violist Jonah Sirota and cellist Greg Beaver were fellow schoolmates at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston, Texas; and the aforementioned coach of the Contrasts, my piano teacher Jeanne Fischer, is mother to first violinist Rebecca Fischer. A pivotal early work for me to compose, Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout (2001), was written for the Chiaras just months after their membership reached completion with the addition of second violinist Hyeyung Julie Yoon. Leyendas draws on Andean folk influences gleaned from an early trip to Perú where I clumsily channeled Bartok in transcribing and recording indigenous tunes heard en situ, optimistically aspiring to the magic number of 10,000 (the number Bartok transcribed and catalogued). Over the many years of our friendship, I’ve gone on to compose several more works for this eminently talented and visionary quartet, all in the spirit of mestizaje, a Utopian term coin by Peruvian writer and folklorist José María Arguedas that describes how cultures can co-exist without one subjugating another. For us, five musicians formed during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain, the turnover of multiple murderous regimes in Latin America, and our own culture wars in the United States, the appeal of Bartok as humanist has been irresistible.
It is no surprise to me, therefore, that the inquisitive and socially-conscious members of the Chiara String Quartet would embark on the joyful mission of championing Bartok’s seminal six string quartets in live performance, often sharing recordings that the composer himself made of peasant musicians of central Europe. To then additionally perform his works from memory is a feat that has to be experienced to be believed. I still remember leaving one concert both moved and speechless when the quartet passionately and lyrically performed two of Bartok’s quartets plus one by Brahms (an early influence on Bartok) utterly without sheet music. To now convey this conviction and audacity in the form of this multi-CD compilation, recorded “by heart,” to the listener at home is a gift that bespeaks their generosity of spirit.
The six quartets, spanning three decades from 1909 to 1939, are a vibrant and moving documentary of Bartok’s evolution as a cultural witness. One can see, for instance, how the composer nuances his youthful definition of “good” folk music by gradually accepting the Eastern European gypsy sound as legitimate and not necessarily tainted by urban commercialism as opposed to the more traditional rural Hungarian peasant sound. By his middle years, Bartok pointed to social oppression as a not inconsiderable influence on gypsy culture. This was likely in reaction to the rise of zealous nationalist fascist parties in Europe in whose rhetoric Bartok might have recognized his own similar anti-gypsy sentiments. The six quartets also reveal Bartok’s increasingly skillful and personal interpretation in which folk influences became so engrained in his musical psyche that he could achieve its essence without directly quoting a representative rhythm or tune.
In this way, the six quartets are an incredibly rich resource of cultural creativity and imagination. Indeed, one can humorously quote from the scores like scripture (“2:2:46,” for instance, refers to the Second Quartet, second movement, measure 46) to find any example desired of compositional inventiveness, cultural fusion, or technical string matters. Each of the quartets also possesses distinct personalities, explicated in great detail by many gifted and qualified writers, whose work is easily found in libraries and on the Internet. I hope they will forgive my own brief and somewhat subjective summaries:
String Quartet No. 1 (1909): A youthful work, famously disowned by the composer, in three movements played without breaks in between. The opening and funereal Lento reflects young Bartok’s unfulfilled love for violinist Stefi Geyer, with a turgid counterpoint that draws comparison to the fugal writing of Beethoven. The next two movements are considerably lighter in tone with the last containing a favorite moment of the Chiara musicians: The recurring appearance of the simple and tender Hungarian folk song “Fly Peacock, Fly!”
String Quartet No. 2 (1917): Also in three movements, the first movement’s traditional sonata form is offset by the second movement’s driving Allegro molto capriccioso whose energy and ferocity seems to defy formal or knowable containment. The final movement, described by Kodály as “suffering,” is striking for its use of immobility and silence.
String Quartet No. 3 (1927): A four-movement work played without breaks, with new string colorations such as glissandi, sul ponticello, and col legno suggesting folk music mannerisms.
String Quartet No. 4 (1928): A five-movement work that adds to the string colorations of the previous quartet with the entire Prestissimo second movement played with mutes, and the entire Allegretto fourth movement played pizzicato. The Non troppo lento third movement is a terrific example of Bartok’s evocative “night music” style, a term that the composer himself approved but did not ever formally define. The work is also notable for accents that loosely mirror Hungarian speech.
String Quartet No. 5 (1934): A five-movement work with an outstanding example of Bulgarian rhythm (a limping 4+2+3) propelling the third movement, “night music” style in the second and fourth movements, and a Hungarian hurdy-gurdy style featured in the finale.
String Quartet No. 6 (1939): A four-movement work with each movement beginning with a melody to be played “mesto” or “sadly.” Bartok originally intended to end the work on a lighthearted note inspired by dance, but recomposed the final movement as an elegy to his mother who died during the composing of the piece.
The presentation of a single composer’s work over decades can be a profoundly moving experience, not unlike looking through a family photo album that stretches through the years. In Bartok’s own case, his six string quartets are all powerful testaments of a will that never ceases to gather momentum. His commitment to the question of cultural identity in the face of rampant hostility and fear, and his distillation of his findings into pitches and rhythms, harmonies and instrumental techniques, took our collective breath away years ago as young musicians. Needless to say, he firmly cemented himself as a lifelong guide and personal hero. Now no longer young but fully into our middle years, we see Bartok’s message of a universal brotherhood and cultural valuation as never having been more urgent: At the time of this recording, war continues to be an ever-present state of being for millions of people worldwide, and strong nationalist forces have newly revealed themselves in our own country, the United States.
Bartok’s message has lost none of its relevance. It is our fervent hope that this recording will contribute to the enduring legacy of a great composer.
Gabriela Lena Frank is the director of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music. Included in the Washington Post's list of the 35 most significant women composers in history (August, 2017), Gabriela was born in Berkeley, California. Winner of a Latin Grammy, she has composed for leading orchestras and worked with luminaries like cellist Yo Yo Ma, soprano Dawn Upshaw, the King’s Singers, and the Kronos Quartet. She also is a passionate believer in service, and has brought her love of music into hospitals, schools, and prisons. Learn more on Gabriela's bio page.