Night music (Bartók) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Night Music is a musical style of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók

Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer...

which he used mostly in slow movements of multi-movement ensemble

Musical ensemble

A musical ensemble is a group of people who perform instrumental or vocal music. In classical music, trios or quartets either blend the sounds of musical instrument families or group together instruments from the same instrument family, such as string ensembles or wind ensembles...

or orchestra

Orchestra

An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...

compositions in his mature period. It is characterized by "eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies."

Characteristics of Night music

As with many musical styles, it is not possible to make a satisfying let alone indisputable definition of Night music. Bartók did not say or explain much about this style, but he approved of the term and used it himself. Most of the works in Night music style do not carry a title. From an audience point of view "'Night Music' consists of those works or passages which convey to the listener the sounds of nature at night". This is quite subjective and self-referential. Mostly, subjective and far-fetched descriptions are available: "quiet, blurred cluster-chords and imitations of the twittering of birds and croaking of nocturnal creatures", "In an atmosphere of hushed expectancy, a tapestry is woven of the tiny sounds of nocturnal animals and insects." More concrete is "Eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies".

Instead of an attempt at defining, a list of characteristics of 'Night music' is more useful.

Sound portrayal as opposed to traditional melody and harmony. An example of Bartók's focus on sound quality are the minute directions on how the percussion instruments in the Sonata for two pianos and percussion
Sonata for two pianos and percussion
Béla Bartók wrote his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz. 110, BB 115 for the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1937 and it was premiered by him and his second wife, Ditta Pásztory-Bartók, as the pianists, and percussionists Saul Goodman and Henry Deneke, at the ISCM anniversary...

have to be played. This sound portrayal includes:
1. The direct imitations of natural sounds, mostly of nocturnal animals. Also the term nature music is sometimes used. Milan Kundera
  Milan Kundera
  Milan Kundera , born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in...
  
  , in commenting on Bartók's expansion of art music with natural sounds, writes "sounds of nature inspire Bartók to melodic motives of a rare strangeness".
2. Evocations of the mood of night and spaciousness.
3. Melodies are portrayed in the music, rather than being a direct means of (self-)expression. For instance, a pastoral flute and its melody are portrayed in The Night’s Music from Out of Doors. The effect on the listener is not primarily the esthetic effect of the melody. The melody's effect is rather indirect: the evocation of being out of doors at night in the plain and hearing the shepherd
  Shepherd
  A shepherd is a person who tends, feeds or guards flocks of sheep.- Origins :Shepherding is one of the oldest occupations, beginning some 6,000 years ago in Asia Minor. Sheep were kept for their milk, meat and especially their wool...
  
  play his melody. In the words of Milan Kundera, not only the natural sounds at night, but also the lonely songs and melodies, far from being a Lied
  Lied
  is a German word literally meaning "song", usually used to describe romantic songs setting German poems of reasonably high literary aspirations, especially during the nineteenth century, beginning with Carl Loewe, Heinrich Marschner, and Franz Schubert and culminating with Hugo Wolf...
  
  or other self-expression of the composer, find their origin in the external world. In the words of Schneider "Bartók seems to be suggesting musically the old Romantic organicist idea that peasant [and shepherds'] music is a natural phenomenon, a view he expressed in writing on several occasions". He also points out that "the G’s [in bar 37 which start as the mere sound of repeated notes and turn into the shepherd's melody] gradually emerge from the myriad of other natural sounds".
On a more technical musical level, a piece or movement of night music style may show any of the following characteristics.
1. An ostinato
  Ostinato
  In music, an ostinato is a motif or phrase, which is persistently repeated in the same musical voice. An ostinato is always a succession of equal sounds, wherein each note always has the same weight or stress. The repeating idea may be a rhythmic pattern, part of a tune, or a complete melody in...
  
  sound on every beat in the slow prevailing tempo, often this sound is dissonant, and/or a cluster chord. Because of the slow and repetitive nature, these sounds come to fulfil an accompanying or background role.
2. Curt motives at irregular time intervals within the meter. These motives may be the imitations of the natural sounds or more abstract, often primitive, motives. An example is A,A,A,C,A,A in the second movement of the Sonata for two pianos and percussion
  Sonata for two pianos and percussion
  Béla Bartók wrote his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz. 110, BB 115 for the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1937 and it was premiered by him and his second wife, Ditta Pásztory-Bartók, as the pianists, and percussionists Saul Goodman and Henry Deneke, at the ISCM anniversary...
  
  . This motive is scored as a quintuplet
  Tuplet
  In music a tuplet is "any rhythm that involves dividing the beat into a different number of equal subdivisions from that usually permitted by the...
  
  of sixteenths in 4/4 time on the third beat, plus a sixteenth note on the fourth beat: the last A. As the implied or latent rhythm is 3+2+1, it sounds as an accelerando which evaporates suddenly.
3. Wide pitch ranges in glissandi, jumps and doublings over many octaves. This contrasts heavily with cluster chords of adjacent notes and trills and may well add to the evocation of spaciousness or loneliness.
4. Overlap and insertions of widely different materials, e.g. a bird call in a melodic line. Different materials sound irrespective of one another leading to novel sound effects, and, more subjectively, multiple layers and perhaps the feeling of spaciousness.

Compositions in Night music style

Night music developed stepwise and has unclear boundaries to other musical types. Yet, a list of pieces of Night music can be established including its precursors. In some cases one could argue that only specific sections within a piece or movement are Night music. Danchenka's list (1987) of some works contains at many entries which exact bars are Night music. For instance, only the middle section of the Piano Concerto No. 3

Piano Concerto No. 3 (Bartók)

Béla Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 3 in E major, Sz. 119, BB 127 is a musical composition for piano and orchestra. The piece was composed in 1945 by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók during the final months of his life. It consists of three movements.-Context:...

is included. However, Gillies (1993) points out how the main melodic material of the opening and closing sections are related to the bird calls of the middle section. As the bird calls could not be modified to match other melodic material, the opening and closing section have to have been directly derived from the bird calls.

Second Suite for small orchestra Op. 4, Sz. 34, BB 40, mvt. 3, Andante 1905
Fourteen Bagatelles Op. 6, nr.12. 1908
Fragments of sections and moods in the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle 1911(-1917)
Five songs op. 15 nr. 5, Here down in the valley (Hungarian: Itt lenn a völgyben) 6 February 1916
The Miraculous Mandarin
The Miraculous Mandarin
The Miraculous Mandarin or The Wonderful Mandarin Op. 19, Sz. 73 , is a one act pantomime ballet composed by Béla Bartók between 1918–1924, and based on the story by Melchior Lengyel. Premiered November 27, 1926 in Cologne, Germany, it caused a scandal and was subsequently banned...

Op. 19. 1918-1924: The section where, in the dark, the mandarin's body glows with an eerie blue-green light.
Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs op.20, nr.3. 1920
Dance Suite, mvt. 4, 1923
Lullaby from Village Scenes (Falún) (mvt. 4 of voice version, 1924, mvt. 2 of chamber choir version, May 1926)
The Night’s Music of the five piano pieces Out of Doors, Lento – (un poco) pìu Andante 1926 listen
Piano Concerto No. 1
Piano Concerto No. 1 (Bartók)
The Piano Concerto No. 1 , Sz. 83, BB 91 of Béla Bartók was composed in 1926. It is about 23 to 24 minutes long.-Background:For almost three years, Bartók had composed little. He broke that silence with several piano works, one of which was the piano concerto...

, mvt. 2, Andante 1926
String Quartet No. 3
String Quartet No. 3 (Bartók)
The String Quartet No. 3 by Béla Bartók was written in September 1926 in Budapest.The work is in one continuous stretch with no breaks, but is divided in the score into four parts:#Prima parte: Moderato#Seconda parte: Allegro...

, mvt. 1, Moderato 1927
String Quartet No. 4
String Quartet No. 4 (Bartók)
The String Quartet No. 4 by Béla Bartók was written from July to September, 1927 in Budapest.The work is in five movements:#Allegro#Prestissimo, con sordino#Non troppo lento#Allegretto pizzicato#Allegro molto...

, mvt. 3, Non troppo lento 1928
Piano Concerto No. 2
Piano Concerto No. 2 (Bartók)
Béla Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 2 in G major, Sz. 95, BB 101 is one of the composer's more accessible compositions for audiences. It is especially notorious for being one of the most difficult pieces in the repertoire....

, mvt. 2, Adagio – Più adagio – Presto - Tempo I, 1931
String Quartet No. 5
String Quartet No. 5 (Bartók)
The String Quartet No. 5 Sz. 102, BB 110 by Béla Bartók was written between August 6 and September 6, 1934.The work is in five movements:#Allegro#Adagio molto#Scherzo: alla bulgarese#Andante#Finale: Allegro vivace...

, mvt. 2 Adagio molto and 4 Andante 1934
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Sz. 106, BB 114 is one of the best-known compositions by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. Commissioned by Paul Sacher to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, the score is dated September 7, 1936...

, mvt. 3, Adagio 1936
Sonata for two pianos and percussion
Sonata for two pianos and percussion
Béla Bartók wrote his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz. 110, BB 115 for the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1937 and it was premiered by him and his second wife, Ditta Pásztory-Bartók, as the pianists, and percussionists Saul Goodman and Henry Deneke, at the ISCM anniversary...

, mvt. 2, Lento, ma non troppo Video of Marta Argerich and Nelson Freire 1937
Mikrokosmos, Nr 107 Melody in the Mist- tranquillo Listen to György Sándor playing most of it., and Nr. 144, Minor seconds, Major Sevenths - LentoAnd here playing Minor Seconds, Major Sevenths published 1940.
Concerto for Orchestra (Bartók)
Concerto for Orchestra (Bartók)
Concerto for Orchestra, Sz. 116, BB 123, is a five-movement musical work for orchestra composed by Béla Bartók in 1943. It is one of his best-known, most popular and most accessible works. The score is inscribed "15 August – 8 October 1943", and it premiered on December 1, 1944 in Boston Symphony...

, Introduction of mvt. 1 and mvt. 3, ‘‘Elegia’’ Video of mvt. 1 Video of mvt. 3 1943
Piano Concerto No. 3
Piano Concerto No. 3 (Bartók)
Béla Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 3 in E major, Sz. 119, BB 127 is a musical composition for piano and orchestra. The piece was composed in 1945 by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók during the final months of his life. It consists of three movements.-Context:...

, mvt. 2, Adagio religioso Video of Zoltán Kocsis Video of András Schiff 1945
Sketches for a Viola Concerto
Viola Concerto (Bartók)
Béla Bartók's Viola Concerto, Sz. 120, BB 128 was written in July – August 1945, in Saranac Lake, New York, while he was suffering from the terminal stages of leukemia. It was commissioned by William Primrose. Along with the Piano Concerto No. 3, it is his last work, and he left it incomplete at...

, mvt. 2, Adagio religioso 1945

Development of Night music in Bartók's output

As a modernist composer, Bartók did not compose music as the esthetic expression of human ethics, and as a reserved personality he shunned sentimentality, specifically breaking with Romantic nineteenth century music. While he largely based his music in faster tempo on the vitality of folk music, folk music did not provide him with many suitable idioms for slow movements (an exception is e.g. the "sirató" (elegy) middle section of the Piano Sonata (1926)).
The development of Night music was influenced by sound effect compositions by Debussy and Ravel as well as pre-Bachian composers like Couperin

Couperin

The Couperin family were a musical dynasty of professional composers and performers. They were the most prolific family in French musical history, active during the Baroque era...

. Schneider shows the influence of the Hungarian style of musical depictions of nature, night and the vast open space by the Hungarian composers Erkel, Mosonyi

Mihály Mosonyi

Mihály Mosonyi was a Hungarian composer. Born Michael Brand, he changed his name to Mosonyi in honor of the district of Moson , with Mihály being the Hungarian equivalent of "Michael"...

, Szendy, Weiner, and Dohnányi

Erno Dohnányi

Ernő Dohnányi was a Hungarian conductor, composer, and pianist. He used the German form of his name Ernst von Dohnányi for most of his published compositions....

.
Close family of Bartók agree that inspiration for Night music came from summer nights at Szőllőspuszta where Bartók visited his sister from 1921 onwards. This estate lies in Békés county in the Great Hungarian Plain

Great Hungarian Plain

The Great Hungarian Plain is a plain occupying the southern and eastern part of Hungary, some parts of the Eastern Slovak Lowland, southwestern Ukraine, the Transcarpathian Lowland , western Romania , northern Serbia , and eastern Croatia...

, Nagy Alföld.

The Song op. 15 nr. 5 Here down in the valley is a song in the Lied

Lied

is a German word literally meaning "song", usually used to describe romantic songs setting German poems of reasonably high literary aspirations, especially during the nineteenth century, beginning with Carl Loewe, Heinrich Marschner, and Franz Schubert and culminating with Hugo Wolf...

tradition. Consequently, nature is not objectively portrayed as it is in Night music but nature mirrors the emotions of the subject. Nonetheless, it contains a night music characteristic: arpeggiated clusters of three adjacent notes in the medium and lower registers on the piano, played forte. The text is not particularly strong, but greater forces than artistic value (let alone reason) formed the inspiration: Bartók was madly in love with the poetess.

INTERMEZZO The genesis of Here down in the Valley

Starting in the summer of 1915, Bartók (by that time 34 years old) undertook collection trips of Slovakian folk music in the country while staying in the mansion of Gombossy, the chief forester of the comitatus
Comitatus (Kingdom of Hungary)
A county is the name of a type of administrative units in the Kingdom of Hungary and in Hungary from the 10th century until the present day....

Zólyom, near the town of Kisgaram (now Hronec
Hronec
Hronec is a village and municipality in Brezno District, in the Banská Bystrica Region of central Slovakia.-History:In historical records, the village was first mentioned in 1357, when it belonged to Ľupča. In 1405 it was given by Hungarian kings to the knight Paul...

in central Slovakia
Slovakia
The Slovak Republic is a landlocked state in Central Europe. It has a population of over five million and an area of about . Slovakia is bordered by the Czech Republic and Austria to the west, Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east and Hungary to the south...

). The forester had a fourteen-year-old daughter, Klára, whom Denijs Dille later described as of lively intelligence and openness of character and at fourteen coquettish, strong-willed and mischievous. She went along on Bartók’s trips and although she played piano, we can assume that her stimulating support soon extended beyond the musical level. She was not only musically but also literary inclined and showed the composer a number of her poems, all in a late Romantic style: pathetic, egocentric, sentimental, hysteric. In short, entirely alien to Bartók's modernism. Nonetheless, Bartók was quite impressed. In a single day, on 6 February 1916, he wrote the music to one of them, ‘Here down in the valley’. Given the text, the traditional Lied was a better idiom than a fully modernist song. Bartók is said to have been ready to leave his wife and his five-year-old son to marry Klára. She refused, even her friend Wanda Gleiman, author of one song in op. 15, could not convince her. By October 1916 he ended his correspondence with Klára. Much later Bartók admitted the texts of his songs op. 15 are ‘not particularly good’; Klára's spell had worn off. He wanted to publish them but only if his publisher would not mention the authors of the texts. As his publisher was afraid of copyright breach, it was left unpublished until 1958. In the first editions Bartók himself and the accomplished hungarian poet Ady Endre were suggested as the hidden text writer. Denijs Dille discovered the true authorship from interviews with both girls in the late 1970's, shortly before their passing.

The first composition in fully developed Night music style, "the locus classicus of a uniquely Bartókian contribution to the language of musical modernism", is the fourth piece of the Out of Doors set for solo piano, the instrument he knew best (June 1926). This piece is called The Night’s Music and bestowed its name on the entire style. Despite its immediate success, Bartók realised the piano is ill suited for compositions of overlapping, widely differing musical textures. Therefore, he employed ensembles

Musical ensemble

and orchestra

Orchestra

s for his further compositions in mature Night music style: slow movements of, among others, concerti and string quartets. Bartók wrote only two more solo piano pieces of night music type: Mikrokosmos nr. 107 Melody in the Mist and nr. 144, Minor seconds, major sevenths.

Melody in the Mist is technically really quite easy ) but shows a number of characteristics of Night music. There is an overlapping alteration of "Mist": a block chord

Block chord

A block chord is a chord or voicing built directly below the melody either on the strong beats or to create a four-part harmonized melody line in "locked-hands" rhythmic unison with the melody, as opposed to broken chords...

of G-A-C-D around middle C

Middle C

C or Do is the first note of the fixed-Do solfège scale. Its enharmonic is B.-Middle C:Middle C is designated C4 in scientific pitch notation because of the note's position as the fourth C key on a standard 88-key piano keyboard...

, going up and down in semitones; and an unaccompanied "lonely" "Melody" from "the external world": a mostly pentatonic (Hungarian Old style(!)) melody with pitch inventory G-A-C-D-F (F once changed to leading tone F), unaccompanied and sometimes doubled at a distance of one or two octaves. At the end the block chord

Block chord

of G-A-C-D and that very chord but a semitone up (G-A-C-D) sound simultaneously.

One of Bartók's most performed pieces is his Concerto for Orchestra. The opening bars present a theme of rising fourths in cellos and basses, answered by tremolando strings and fluttering flutes in Bartók's characteristic "Night music" style. Trumpets, pianissimo, chant a pungent, short-phrased chorale [...] Bartók described the keystone third movement, "Elegia," as a "lugubrious death-song," in which unsettled "night music" effects alternate with intense, prayerful supplications (again related to the chorale-like material that pervades the first half of the work).

Bartók's last composition which contains Night music style is the slow movement of his third piano concerto, written in August and September 1945. He wrote it when mortally ill, he died September 26.

The movement opens and closes in an almost Romantic style, the middle section contains sounds of nature. Kundera wrote: The hypersensitive theme, unspeakably melancholic, is contrasted with the other, hyperobjective theme [...]: as if a soul in tears can only find solace in the non-sensitivity of nature. The natural sounds are still mysterious and full of anticipation, but not at all eerie. They are rather peaceful, perhaps light, as if in his last night music, a bright new morning is ready to break.

Sources

Brown, M.J.E., (1980) The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, (ed. Sadie),London, MacMillan, 1980 (1995), Vol. 13, ISBN 0333231112 ISBN 978-0333231111.
Danchenka, Gary. "Diatonic Pitch-Class Sets in Bartok's Night Music" Indiana Theory Review 8, no. 1 (Spring, 1987): 15-55.
Fosler-Lussier, D., (2007) Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture. (California Studies in 20th-Century Music) ISBN 978-0520249653
Gillies, M. editor (1993) The Bartók Companion. ISBN 0-931340-74-8
Harley, M.A., (1995) "Natura naturans, natura naturata" and Bartok's Nature Music Idiom, Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, T. 36, Fasc. 3/4, Proceedings of the International Bartok Colloquium, Szombathely, July 3–5, 1995, Part I (1995), pp. 329–349 doi:10.2307/902218
Kundera, Milan (1993), Les Testaments trahis, Editions Flammarion (24 septembre 1993), ISBN 2070736059, ISBN 978-2070736058
Schneider, D., (2006) Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality (California Studies in 20th-Century Music) ISBN 978-0520245037
Yeomans, D. (1988) Bartók for piano. ISBN 0-253-21383-5 (Subtitle: A survey of his solo literature.)

Characteristics of Night music

Compositions in Night music style

Development of Night music in Bartók's output

Sources

Further reading