Bartókiana - Abstracts

Semiotic Society of America
Semiotics and Music
University of Ottawa
October 2003

On Provenance and Filiation: from Comparative Musicology (Bartók) to Le affinità primitive (Eco)

By Damjana Bratuž

The theme of this conference allows me to bring together information hitherto mentioned occasionally through the years in separate papers within my larger Bartókiana project.
When in 1913 Béla Bartók heard in Biskra (Algiers) a type of ornamented melody analogous to the ones he had collected the previous year in Romania, he assumed a possibility of “filiation directe.” In 1932, at congress in Cairo he heard similar melodic types from Iraki performers, and he spoke of a triangle and hypothesized the existence “d’une étonnante chaine d’influences réciproques.”

His approach “was stimulated by the ‘comparatist’ passion” of the period, as Italo Calvino put it in his Introduction to Fiabe Italiane, where he opposed the concern with the provenance, the origin, of a tale by the scholars of “the ‘Finnish’ or historical-geographic school” - i.e. the Ilmari Krohn method adopted by Bartók himself - to his own stress on variants, on the transformational aspect of the tales.
In his 1984 essay devoted the exhibit of tribal and avant-garde art at MOMA in New York, Umberto Eco probed the concepts of analogy, and of the distinction between influence and affinity derived from the opportunity of the exhibit’s gioco di confronti.
These concept are used in my presentation to examine, through audiovisual examples, some aspects of national identity in Bartók’s collected folksongs, as well as in his own composition.

Equipment needed:
Power Point presentation preferred.
Alternately, an Overhead projector, and CD player