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The starting point is the concept of Bartók's 'So-Called-Bulgarian Rhythm' as it appears in György Kurtág's The sayings of Péter Bornemisza. This rhythmic type has been identified in Kurtág's The sayings by two commentators and also by Kurtág himself while sketching for the work. It appears here as a unifying structural element within movements as well as across the cycle as a whole. It is juxtaposed with descriptions of fear, death and pastoral reawakening in the text, in transformations of varying musical significance (once in combination with an allusion to Penderecki's Threnody). The type's interaction with the body in the text of The sayings invites a reading drawing on the bodily engagement with music that Bartók advocated after his contact with peasant music in general, but with particular reference to 'So-Called-Bulgarian Rhythm'.
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.
Already in some of Bartók's juvenile compositions, a definite attraction is manifested for the irregular rhythmics. This is an early appearance of additive metrics, opposed to the conventional divisive one. An extremely rich selection for irregular meters was offered to Bartók by Rumanian folk song material, particularly in the “colindas”. Speaking about, although Bartók used the term “Bulgarian rhythm”, although knew well this was not an exclusively Bulgarian peculiarity. The phenomenon shows clearly the existing form of the additive-substractive metrics, because the quantitatively various bar structures alternate by augmenting or diminishing by one quaver (as common nominator), a kind of “mistuning in the time”. This thinking has been well documented in a series of various examples, but the Sonata for two pianos and percussion (1937) provides an extremely rich selection of rhythm combination, in which the inner overstructurating of the bar, resp. the mistuning of the meter plays the principal role (3+3+3/8à1+2+2+2+2/8à 4+2+3/8).
thirteen or fourteen was sweet. I used to play the first Bulgarian Rhythm to death. The Boosey & Hawkes edition was the first time I think I ever saw the Hungarian language written out, in the titles, together with multiple translations, so I learned a few
“Fanfares,” and is commonly understood as an “aksak” pattern. In fact, this theoretical pattern is mentioned early on in Béla Bartók's 1938 essay on “The So-Called Bulgarian Rhythm,” and used in the fourth of his “Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm” in the
present paper, I occasionally refer to the asymmetric meter of this movement as “Bulgarian rhythm,” an authentic term derived from Bartók's usage; see his essay, “The So-called Bulgarian Rhythm” in Béla Bartók Essays , ed. by Benjamin SUCHOFF (London
, 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
–53 “Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm” have, according to Bartók, Hungarian themes embedded in Bulgarian rhythms. In these nationally hybrid elements, one may discover covert manifestation of his credo, “the brotherhood of peoples,” which he explained in a
. Furthermore, in a later lecture, “New Results of Folk Song Research in Hungary,” he illustrated the violin music with a dance melody in Bulgarian rhythm from the Banat region and four melodies from Maramureș (out of which three were performed by Drăguș). Among
