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Bartók’s “Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm,” the only formally self-contained set within the Mikrokosmos, is the crowning series of pieces in this huge compendium of the composer’s later piano music. Since Bartók recorded all six of them in 1940, they are ideal for an investigation of performance issues. The recordings from the Mikrokosmos, although relatively late, are fortunately close to the composition of most of the pieces, which makes these recordings all the more “authentic.” The essay, however, focuses on the concept of the series as a series revisiting the compositional manuscripts, discussing the evolution of the individual pieces and the emergence of the idea of the set (first intended to comprise only five pieces) and Bulgarian rhythm as a pedagogical issue within the series. The “Six Dances” also bear a somewhat enigmatic dedication to the British pianist of Jewish descent, Harriet Cohen, obviously not an accidental choice. The dedication might be considered with what Bartók said in an interview in 1940 about the “hibridity” of national musical types in his “Bulgarian” pieces as well as with his article “Race Purity in Music” (1942) in mind. The significance of order and ordering in Bartók’s creative work, a hitherto little discussed common central element in the various fields of his activity, collecting, performing and composing, are also discussed.
The article presents information concerning the New York Bartók Archives, as gleaned by the author from more than thirty years (1978–2011) of conversations with Benjamin Suchoff, his writings, and some other scholarly sources. Suchoff came into contact with Victor Bator, the executor and trustee of the Bartók estate, in 1953 as he was trying to locate the manuscripts he needed for his doctoral thesis on Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. Soon he became curator and, eventually, head of the New York Bartók Archives. The article describes Suchoff ’s career as editor, with references to the history of Bartók’s manuscripts, and to the major projects of the New York Bartók Archive such as the publication of Bartók’s works dedicated to Romanian, Turkish, Yugoslav, Hungarian, and Slovak folk music, his theoretical writings (Béla Bartók Essays), and some of his compositions (The Archive Edition series).
The recognition of topoi, i.e. traditional formulae, is an important means of musical analysis. To illustrate this, the paper discusses the types of the battaglia and the pastoral in Bach’s Cantata Halt im Gedächtnis Jesum Christ, and briefly enumerates different types of allusions to jazz in 20th-century compositions by Stravinsky, Milhaud, Blacher, Tippet, and Zimmermann. Then it raises the possibility of an analysis of topoi in Bartók’s music in four main categories. It considers Bartók’s musical quotations from Bach to Shostakovich; the chorale as special topos appearing in Mikrokosmos, in the Concerto for Orchestra, in the Adagio religioso of the Third Piano Concerto; the topos-like employment of the tritone; and finally the idea of a Bartókian Arcadia in the Finale of Music for Strings, and the integration of bird song in the Adagio religioso.
Bartók later mentioned these pieces as forerunners to another collection of pedagogical pieces, Mikrokosmos (BB 105, 1932–1939) but the equal treatment of two individual parts is also related to the Forty-Four Duos . One may even discover similarity
, and painstaking pioneering work by János Demény as far back as the 1950s, published in Hungarian. (The list’s accuracy is generally high, although its claim of a world première of five or all six of the “Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm” from Mikrokosmos
special sympathy towards subjects related to Hungarian music history might have owed something to his early experience. In one of his cherished e-mail messages in the immediate wake of the publication of the critical edition of Bartók's Mikrokosmos , he
(München: Henle and Budapest: Editio Musica, 2017) (= BBCCE , vol. 24); Yusuke NAKAHARA (ed.), Mikrokosmos (2) (München: Henle and Budapest: Editio Musica, [2021]) (= BBCCE , vol. 41); Felix MEYER (ed.), Musik für Saiteninstrumente, Schlagzeug und
„Ut pictura meditatio”. A győri volt jezsuita rendház díszlépcsőinek dekorációja a jezsuita Mária-emblematika kontextusában
“Ut pictura meditatio”. The decoration of the staircase of the former győr jesuit college in the context of jesuit marian emblematics
Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe. (Mikrokosmos, 18.) Frankfurt a. M . 1986 . Werner Berg – Ulrich Rehm : Jakobsleiter . In: Marienlexikon . 3 . kötet, 348 – 350 . Dieter Bitterli : An Inventory of Applied emblems in Switzerland . 2012–2018 , url
Mikrokosmos (no. 151), although Bartók's essay goes on to emphasize some of the more distinctively additive patterns that can be rendered as odd meters in 5, 7, and 9. 3 Example 1. Ligeti, Horn Trio, mov. II, ostinato patterns used in the piano, left hand, mm
Cross ( London etc .: Academic Press , 1991 ), 327 – 362 . Jagamas , János . „ Népi és népies dallamelemek” [Folkloristische und volkstümliche Melodieelemente] , in id . A népzene mikrokozmoszában. Tanulmányok [In dem Mikrokosmos der Volksmusik
