Bartók and Shostakovich

The following couple of posts will contain excerpts from a recent paper I wrote for music history class on the relationship between the Composers Bela Bartok and Dmitri Shostakovich, hope you like it =) Quotations will be cited in the final posting of the essay.

Bartók and Shostakovich were two of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. Each composer (Bartók from the early twentieth century, and Shostakovich from the middle to late twentieth century) was greatly influenced by the times in which they lived. Their social backgrounds, Bartók a native Hungarian, Shostakovich a native Russian, and the turbulent political climate of Western Europe, shaped and molded their lives and their music. Both lived through war and were affected deeply by death and tragedy. And both treasured the power, breadth, and striking rhythmic vitality of the music of antiquity.
Using folk and gypsy music as a spring board for his musical endeavors, Bartók, who was one of the first ethnomusicologists, travelled across Hungary with friend and fellow composer Zoltan Kodaly. During his journeys in 1913, he collected Slovakian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Hungarian folk music and wrote it down for posterity. The usage of folk material has a prominent role in Bartók's music. He was very interested in more oriental modes and scales such as the pentatonic and whole tone scale. Bartók's infatuation with folk music sparked while on holiday in 1904. During this retreat, he happened upon the folk-singing of Lidi Dósa, an eighteen-year-old nursemaid. A peculiar characteristic of the piece was the fact that it was in a three line, ABC form, rather than the conventional AABA, da capo form. Bartók was also fascinated by the fact that it was in the pentatonic scale. According to Rory Braddell "This modification of form and tonality was a revelation to Bartók." This indigenous Magyar music captivated Bartók, and it began his quest to collect the folk music of Hungary. In the fourth string quartet for example, the opening of the slow central movement is in the parlando-rubato "singing style", rhythm of the Romanian hora lunga, or long song, that Bartók discovered in Maramuresç County. Bartók once said that "the complete absence of any sentimentality or exaggeration of expression… is what gives rural music a certain simplicity, austerity, sincerity of feeling, even grandeur."