Bla Bartk - On Bartk's Improvisations and the "Pippa
Principle"
A long time ago I read a statement by Wilhelm Furtwngler
to the effect that, unlike modern music, classical music
seemed to remain impervious to the onslaught of the
amateur performer. The explanation, or the implication,
was — if memory serves me correctly — that
by virtue of their very structure, their built-in relationships,
works by Mozart and Beethoven allowed their greatness
to remain recognizable and undiminished, in spite of
the amateur's inadequacy; both could be heard clearly.
Such recognition is possible only when familiarity
with a certain order enables the listener to perceive
it, regardless of the execution a composition is subjected
to. The same situation occurs in the realm of professional
interpretation. A new, different ordering of musical
language, whose codes are unfamiliar or are not yet
shared by the composer-performer-listener trinomial,
requires a new mode, different skills, of listening.
For this to develop, a composer obviously depends on
the ear of the performer. However, to hear or, better,
entendre, with its double meaning of hearing
and comprehending, is not as natural and absolute a
capability as someone with an educated ear may assume.
Much has been written in modern art criticism to show
the fallacy of the theory of the "innocent eye."
The fact that there exists no "innocent ear"
is something most performers are simply not aware of;
what the eye sees on the score, what the ear hears in
the music, and what the technical apparatus translates
into sound, are all born out of reflexes carried over
from music previously learned. Rare is the performing
artist whose sensitivity and imagination are guided
by proper observation, who is aware of unfamiliar relationships,
who possesses a translator's skill and perception to
decode new orders of musical thought, and finally, who
is capable of giving them the appropriate voice.
The performer approaching an unfamiliar style is very
much in the position of someone learning a foreign language.
Previous skill is of no avail. Art historian EH. Gombrich
writes:
When confronted with the task
of saying "Lisbeth," a child who had learned
to say "papa" and "mama" produced
the compromise "Pippa" — a transposition
of the sounds he heard into the limited phonemes of
his language. What we call a "foreign accent"
is nothing but an extension of this "Pippa principle."
The foreigner imitates the sounds of the new language
as far as the phonemes of his native tongue allow.
The motor habits acquired early in life will not only
condition his speech but also the way be "hears"
the language. His original schemata have conditioned
him to watch out for certain distinctive features
while ignoring other variations of sound as irrelevant,
and nothing proves harder than articulating the world
of sound afresh . . . . An accent, we suspect, has
many similarities to those all-pervading qualities
we call "style." ( 1
)
Most piano students and concert
artists have been conditioned by nineteenth-century
repertory and carry what has become to there a native
accent into the repertory of the preceding centuries
as well as of the twentieth. Although in Western musical
tradition certain features of prosody and rhythm are
shared by different schools and individual composers
(not unlike those which occur in the spoken languages),
such shifts of musical thinking and such a reordering
of relations have taken place in history, that no musical
ear could have failed to perceive them — or so
it seemed to the composer. We know from Delacroix how
resentful Chopin was when his music was praised for
the less relevant qualities, while his real contribution,
that is, the simultaneity of different rhythmic orbits
with their resulting tensions, remained unheard.(
2 ) To this day, most performers
have no awareness of this dimension in Chopin's music.
We know from Debussy how much he disapproved of what
he called the "cocktail" concept of music:
Je m'efforce d'employer chaque
timbre I'tat de puret; comme Mozart par example.
Et, de I vient qu'on ne sait plus jouer du Mozart.
On a trop appris mlanger les timbres; les faire
ressortir par des ombres ou des masses, sans les faire
jouer avec leur valeurs memes.
( 3 )
But the blurring of lines and layers into an amalgam
of sound is the very way Debussy's music is still heard,
for the most part, today, in the name of a vagueness
which exists solely in the perception of the performer.
Yet, it is the music of Bartk which appears to have
suffered most through the misreading and misinterpretation
of performers — Western and, paradoxically, Hungarian
also. So much is this so, that when the re-issue of
a Bartk piano recording comes along to one hears in
it not only a totally different reading, but indeed
a different kind of music. In my experience, the force
of the "Pippa principle" is so apparent that
the playing of a Bartk recorded performance often results
in such categorical statements by teachers and students
as, "Bartk was obviously one of those composers
who could not play his own music."
"Let my music speak for itself," Bartk answered
his first biographer, Denijs Dille, when the latter
suggested that perhaps some explanation for the listeners
would be in order. But the chance for Bartk's music
to be intelligible was less than it had been for that
of Chopin or Debussy, for the new mode of perception
in compositional and imaginative matters it called for
required familiarity with a prosody that was alien to
Western ears.
No analysis of the score or technical
know-how can possibly supply a pianist with the capacity
to interpret, that is, to translate from a notation
which he can only read and hear in terms of traditional
symbols and references. For instance, he will naturally,
unthinkingly, lead short values toward longer ones,
see to it that up-beats fall onto the next down-beat,
will distribute accents of lesser or greater intensity,
or shape phrases and round them off with appropriate
nuances. These commonplaces are understood as part of
musicianship itself, and not as part of a musical heritage
based on a distinctive prosody. In this heritage, the
musical discourse follows linguistic properties common
to Indo-European languages: the anacrusis, a rhythm
conceived as a succession of accented and unaccented
sounds and inflection. Bartk, however, adopted in his
musical prosody the metrical properties of a Ianguage
which is not Indo-European. Hungarian has no anacrusis
— every word is stressed on the first vowel, first
syllable — and the rhythm is quantitative, i.e.
composed of short and long syllables.
( 4 ) Bartk had no tradition
to follow; he adopted the heightened version of the
Hungarian and other non-Western idioms contained in
folk music and used them as a structural buildingblock.
In a single lifetime, his music filled the gap which
derived from the absence of a long tradition, creating
the full cycle of evolution which Western music had
taken centuries to achieve. Bartk did not use folk
music for its exterior signs of national characteristics,
but as an element of musical structure in a new order
of relationships, in new dimensions of time, space and
proportion.
Bartk's
Improvisations Op. 20 represent what he termed
the "second way" of composing with authentic
folk material, i.e. using it as a "motto"
surrounded by, embedded in and juxtaposed to totally
alien, invented, "daring" musical substance.
( 5 ) The eight tunes of
the Improvisations contain the three types of
Hungarian rhythm which Bartk described: (
6 )parlando-rubato,
requiring a speech-conditioned articulation of longer
and shorter syllables, indicated in No. 3 of the Improvisations
and implied elsewhere, e.g. in No. 7, by dashes above
a succession of notes; tempo giusto rhythm, of
a stricter kind, yet preserving always the flexibility
of the dance gesture, as exemplified in Bartk's recorded
performances; and the dotted rhythm 
the most alien to Western tradition, in which the main
stress occurs on the shorter note. (
7 ) In the score of the
Improvisations, all the given stresses 
convey a particular quality of attack and duration which
is abstracted from the spoken sound of the text. The
lack of anacrusis pull is clearly marked by staccato
dots, short rests, or slurs. Familiarity with the composer's
collections of folk material acquaints one with the
four-line structure of each "motto" as well
as with their syllabic formations. The lines of Nos.
1, 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8, form an ABCD structure which speaks
for the antiquity of the tunes. Those of Nos. 3 and
4 have an ABA'B' structure, further indication of their
Eastern connections.
Both careful obeying of the signs and intellectual
probing remain powerless to activate those gestures,
that diction, that freedom of articulation which are
intrinsic to the music. Instinctively a "foreigner"
will either read into the score what it does not contain
or less than it does, or he will distort it. There is
for instance a sort of dynamic equality to the articulation
of the Hungarian folk-derived idiom, not unlike that
of Baroque keyboard music, in which agogic flexibility
replaces, for expressive purposes, Romantic inflection
and nuance. Any search for the key to this style in
the content of the text —of what the tune is about
— is based on ignorance as well as naiveté,
since all musical properties contained in the spoken
work — the accentuation, the length of the vowels
— have been absorbed into the musical material,
transformed and clearly notated. Like language, music
is speech, in a sense, before it is sign. Therefore
Bartk never allowed his son and pupil Peter to play
anything that he had not learned to sing first. The
inner ear decides all.
Familiarity with the language
Bartk drew from in his Improvisations generates
that shock of recognition that comes upon hearing his
performances of Nos. 1, 2, 6, 7 and 8, in the recent
re-issue of an old recordings. (
8 ) One is reminded of
Emerson's words:
Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly
we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose
not.
Often we hear a foreigner speak our language in the
most accurate, precise manner, and yet it does not sound
"right." Most students play unfamiliar styles
like an actor who learns the lines phonetically without
being able to speak the language himself. If I mentioned
above that even Hungarian performers often misinterpret
Bartk's music, that happens because few have been exposed
to the musical language of their village culture, such
as Bartk knew it.
But it is in a comparison of the
reading of the Improvisations by a superior musician
with Bartk's own that one can best study the mischief
of the "Pippa" principle." Few contemporary
performers possess the wide-ranging preparation, the
integrity, or the skill of the American pianist Charles
Rosen. And yet he betrays his unawareness of Bartk's
world- behind-the-notes in his commentary to his recording
of the Improvisations ( 9
) when he states that "they are still in
the rhapsodic tradition of the Liszt virtuoso arrangements
of gypsy music." He ignores the Bartkian prosodic
quality an the articulation it requires, and believes
instead that:
There is a greater attempt to
control the rhapsodic [italics mine] quality:
the continual changes of tempo are marked metronomically,
sometimes with indications that last less than half
a second. However, rubato and capriccioso throughout
are evidence that complete control was more than could
be hoped for. ( 10
)
We are back to the non-innocent ear. Established images,
in this case Lisztian, (whose pseudo-Hungarian connotations
are discussed by Bartk in several essays), are mistaken
for perception; the composer's attempt to notate a living
rhythm is seen instead as an attempt to freeze, to structure,
its flow.
In the five Improvisations performed by Bartk
there is first of all a clear rendering of the fourline
structure of the tune. The different tensions created
by each line play one upon the other; the highest degree
of intensity converges onto the third line, which is
separated from the preceding one by a slight caesura,
notated by Bartk in his original transcriptions by
an apostrophe. In Improvisation No. I an apostrophe
as well as a vertical line appear at the end of each
four-line statement. The postlude effect of the last
four bars is clearly conveyed in the composer's performance.
There is an unmistakable initial stress to each first
syllable-note of the six contained in each line. The
"diction" is flexible and elastic. The "alien"
territory in which the ancient tune is embedded is articulated
with a resonant, harmonious and all-enveloping tone.
Mr. Rosen articulates each tune, as if it consisted
of a long unbroken line: the melody proceeds without
revealing its inner construction and the last beats
usually carry over as upbeats. In the first Improvisation
the accompaniment is subdued and not treated according
to the of "second way." The melody carries
on to the end with no feeling of postlude.
The Molto capriccioso of
the second Improvisation does not refer to a
"gypsy" style of performance. Its tempo giusto
rhythm points to a dance tune, as in Nos. 4, 5, and
8. In the Universal edition, which gives the original
tunes (the "mottos") on the first page, it
is stated that the text for No. 2 was missing. It is
conceivable that, because of the overall humourous character
and boisterous treatment, the text belonged to the so-called"men's
songs," whose words were generally naughty and
teasing. The accelerandos and tempo changes reflect
a delivery quite familiar to certain folk poetry which
can be heard on various recordings and which serve as
a good example of this style. (
11 ) In Bartk's performance
of Improvisation No. 2, each sign of articulation
— and every bar contains several — is rendered
in a truly speech-like manner; each line starts with
a clear stress on the first syllable; each is separated
from the preceding, with all the choreography of the
inner design made audible. Mr. Rosen's reading preserves
an up-beat character in the movement of the tune and
disregards the agogic significance of the pesante.
The idiomatic rendering of the
figures
(No. 3) and 
(No. 6) escapes the Western ear. Mr. Rosen hears a cymbalom
in Improvisation No. 6, while the peasant flute,
which is really there, is not recognized. We know Bartk's
articulation of this particular style already from his
recording of Evening in Transylvania:
( 12 ) an instrumental
— not speech-conditioned — rubato, with its
own peculiar agogic freedom.
No. 7 was dedicated to the memory of Debussy who, in
a similar way, had drawn from the prosody of the French
language to create a new order in the language of music.
In paying homage to a revered colleague, Bartk, musicien
hongrois, selected an ancient, melismatic, "Asiatic"
tune. In his recording, Bartk articulates each "cell"
of the material in a parlando manner, with each
sign conveying that sense of experience which is contained
in the human voice, echoing rhythms and connotations
which defy analysis and verbalization. The articulation
of Mr. Rosen again favours a leading of anacrusis toward
gravitational points, which would be logical only in
Western tradition. The syllabic nature and elasticity
of the melodic structure are not perceived. Because
the four-line structure of the tunes does not guide
the articulation, all significant fragments and components
remain submerged in a general long line.
Improvisation
No. 8 is based again on one of those men's songs whose
text, in early editions, has sometimes been defined
as to unfit to print. ( 13
) The English translation of this particular
song can be found in Bartk's collection Hungarian
Folk Music, No. 46. ( 14
) It is therefore delightful to discover in Bartk's
performance of the tune all the subtle references of
the con grazia, bar 9. The flexibility of the
articulation preserves the gesture of the dance; the
poco a poco accelerando, similar in spirit to
the one in No. 2, and the tenuto with its elastic
lengthening of syllables in the final Maestoso,
are true lessons in musical prosody, both in its compositional
and its performing aspect. None of these elements are
present in the reading of Mr. Rosen, albeit his performance
has a remarkable polish to it.
Because of the lack of insight into the properties
of the ancient idiom contained in the folk tunes, the
entire concept of these compositions becomes distorted.
It is a concept based on the clash of two distinctive
and opposing musical languages and on the tensions of
two contrasting modes: the archaic and the modern, the
permanent and the improvisatory. Each preserves its
identity in a play of penetration and interaction; each
energizes the other while being enhanced itself, like
the shifting interplay of figure and background, of
inner and outer, of yes and no. It is the culmination
of Bartk's labours with folk material, and he never
attempted anything similar again.
There remains a certain
validity to performances given from the "outsider
'sit point of view, but to hear Bartk's playing of
his music is to enter a world of unknown beauties. The
re-issues of his recorded performances and the recent
publication of his essays ( 15
) should help to reveal, and to further, the
understanding of his world.
NOTES
- E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion:
A Study of the Psychology of Pictorial Respresentation,
Bollingen Series XXXV/5 (Princeton University Press,
1972), 364. [ Back to Text ]
- Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden
Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic
Imagination (London: Paladin, 1973), 103-104. [ Back
to Text ]
- Quoted in L'Universe sonore
de Debussy by Stefan Jarocinski, Debussy et l'evolution
de la musique au XXe sicle (Paris: Centre National
de la Recherche Scientifique, 1965). [ Back
to Text ]
- cf. Harvard Lectures (1943)
in Bla Bartk Essays, Selected and Edited by Benjamin
Suchoff (London: Faber, 1976), 383 ff. [ Back
to Text ]
- The "first way" being
a less complex harmonization of a tune, the third
a sublimated, invented, folklore-based musical "tongue."
[ Back to Text ]
- Bartk Essays. [ Back
to Text ]
- Ibid. [ Back
to Text ]
- Bartk plays Bartk, Turnabout/Vox
Historical series, THS-65019. [ Back
to Text ]
- Liszt-Bartk, Charles Rosen
pianist, Epic Monaural LC 3878. [ Back
to Text ]
- Ibid. [ Back
to Text ]
- cf. Földédesanyàm,
Népköltészet, Magyar Records, Vol.
1. [ Back to Text ]
- Bartk plays Bartk, Turn-
about/Vox TB 4159. [ Back to Text
]
- cf. Schirmer's edition of
For Children. [ Back to Text
]
- Béla Bartk, Das Ungarische
Volkslied, Ethnomusicologische Schriften, Faksimile
Nachdrucke, Denijs Dille ed. (Budapest: Editio Musica;
Mainz: B. Schott's Söhne, 1965). [ Back
to Text ]
- Bartk Essays. [ Back
to Text ]
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