Béla Bartók was born on March 25, 1881 in Nagyszentimiklós in Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare, in Romania). He died in New York City on September 26, 1945. On June 23, 1936, the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher commissioned a work from Bartók to mark the tenth anniversary of the Basel Kammerorchester (Chamber Orchestra). The Music for String Instruments, Percussion, and Celesta, composed over a remarkably short span of time in the summer of 1936 and completed on September 7,  was the result. Its premiere, by the Basel Kammerorchester with Sacher conducting, took place on January 21, 1937. Universal Edition of Vienna published the piece later that same year. The work is scored for string ensemble (divided into two groups), a large percussion section comprising side two side drums (with and without snares), two pairs of cymbals (at different pitches), tam-tam, and bass drum (all played by a single individual), plus timpani, xylophone, celesta (occasionally taking a second part at the piano), harp, and piano. Duration ca. 26 minutes.

The 1920s were a busy time for Béla Bartók. While holding a teaching position at the Budapest Academy of Music, he continued his scholarly studies of the indigenous music of Eastern Europe and he also toured often as a concert pianist and conductor throughout Europe and the United States.  On one such tour in 1929, he met Paul Sacher (1906–1999; Basel, Switzerland), conductor of the Basel Chamber Orchestra. Sacher had founded the orchestra in 1926 while still a conducting student at the Basel Conservatory for the purpose of performing both modern works and what we now call “early music”  (i.e., music composed prior to the mid-18^th century). He continued to lead  the ensemble until he disbanded it in 1987 after a 61-year run. In addition, in 1933 Sacher also founded the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, a teaching and research institution devoted to early music.

The following year, Sacher married the heiress to the vast fortune of the Hoffmann-LaRouche drug company, and began to use his  wealth to commission new works from leading  contemporary composers. To commemorate the 10^th anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, in June of 1936, Sacher commissioned a work from Bartók for the first time. In his correspondence with Bartók, Sacher requested that the piece not call for wind players (his ensemble was made up largely of amateur players, some of whom boasted only modest abilities), and suggested a workable substitute might be “a piano or cembalo (as a continuo, so to speak) or some kind of percussion instrument.” The Music for String Instruments, Percussion, and Celesta was the result.

The Music calls for an unusual assemblage of instruments: at its core is a body of strings in ten parts and divided into two equal groups. Bartók instructed that the two groups be arrayed around the outside of the ensemble, mirroring each other (only one example of the importance symmetry plays in the conception of the work). The other instruments (percussion, harp, piano, and celesta) occupy the center of the ensemble. Bartók exploits the dual nature of the piano as a percussive string instrument, sometimes using it in the service of the percussion forces, and at other times  emphasizing its melodic qualities in support of the strings.

Bartók had devoted much of the first two decades of the 20th century to the collection and transcription of folk music, often in collaboration with Zoltan Kodály, while on field expeditions in rural Hungary and Romania as well as other parts of Eastern Europe, eventually ranging as far as Algeria and Turkey. Bartók the composer found various uses for the material he collected, sometimes integrating peasant rhythms and harmonic scales into his own musical language, and sometimes using the melodies intact as the basis for new works. In his autobiography Bartok discussed the influence of these sources:

The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work, because It freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys. The greater part of the collected treasure, and the more valuable part, was in old ecclesiastical or old Greek modes, or based on more primitive [pentatonic] scales, and the melodies were full of most free and varied rhythmic phrases and changes of tempi, played both rubato and giusto.

It became clear to me that the old modes, which had been forgotten in our music, had lost nothing of their vigor. Their new employment made new rhythmic combinations possible. This new way of using the diatonic scale brought freedom from the rigid use of the major and minor keys, and eventually led to a new conception of the chromatic scale, every tone of which came to be considered of equal value and could thus be used freely and independently.

One of the “tyrannical” features of the traditional major-minor key system is the strong gravitational attraction exerted by the tonic note; this pull is aided and abetted by the asymmetrical layout of the pitches in tonal scales. Most of the intervals are major seconds (whole steps) but minor seconds (half steps) are located at crucial points in the scales and it is these smaller intervals that nudge the harmony in predictable directions. Treating the tones of the chromatic scale equally allowed for novel harmonic systems, including symmetrical scales and harmonic structures that were free from the stereotyped patterns of progression and resolution so common to traditional tonal music.

Symmetrical structures permeate the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta not only harmonically but also formally. The first movement demonstrates this most vividly. Its principal theme begins on A and rises in its twisted and chromatically tortured way to E-flat as its highest structural note. This interval divides the octave exactly in half, so when the theme is inverted it fills in the other half of the octave, from E-flat to A. The theme fans out through the orchestra in fugal fashion, with each even-numbered statement a fifth higher than the one preceding, and each odd-numbered statement a fifth lower. Overall, the impression is of an expanding wave which reaches its crest at the mid-point of the movement, when the theme is presented in E-flat, which is also the midpoint in the scale from A to A. The movement’s second half unfolds like a mirror image of the first, with statements of the theme turned upside down and backwards (though in compressed form).

Where movement I was slow and densely wrought, movement II is fast and rhythmic. Bartók tells us that it is in sonata form, and its main theme echoes the subject of the first movement. American scholar Benjamin Suchoff has distinguished motives and scale patterns from Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak folk traditions. The bipartite division of the orchestra is used to good effect here, as the two halves of the string section are played off against each other antiphonally.

The atmospheric third movement is an example of Bartok’s “Night Music.” Not a formal designation, pieces in the “night music” style evoke the sensation of being outdoors at night. Bartók family lore has it that the composer drew his inspiration from summers he spent at the country estate of his sister on the Great Hungarian Plain. Isolated clusters of notes or seemingly random melodic gestures conjure the memory of insect, frog, or wild animal sounds; long-held quiet notes suggest the stillness of the nocturnal air. What night music does not generally include is a clear melody in the traditional sense; Bartók devised this style partly to reflect the rhapsodic nature of Eastern European folk songs in a slow tempo. Though impressionistic, this movement nonetheless is tightly organized in an arch form (ABCBA) with brief allusions to the first movement theme interposed between the sections.

Once more we return to the vigorous world of Eastern European folk dance for the fourth movement. Melodies and rhythms from Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine swirl past in quick succession. In addition, this finale provides a summation and resolution of all that has gone before. Thematic ideas from the previous three movements make fresh appearances, and most satisfyingly, the chromatic theme from the first movement returns in a new diatonic guise.

Three years after completing the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Bartok gave an interview in Paris in which he laid out his principal aim as a composer:

Kodaly and I wanted to make a synthesis of East and West. Because of our race, and because of the geographical position of our country, which is at once the extreme point of the East and the defensive bastion of the West, we felt this was a task we were well fitted to undertake.

By successfully integrating the harmonic and rhythmic characteristics of Eastern European folk music with the formal procedures of Western European art music in the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Bartók proved himself up to that task.

—©Victor Gavenda

Zoltán Kodály was born in Kecskemét, Hungary, on December 16, 1882, and died in Budapest, March 6, 1967. The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, tambourine, triangle, bells, and strings. Duration ca. 15 minutes.

Galánta is a small Hungarian market town known to travelers between Vienna and Budapest. The composer passed there seven years of his childhood. There existed at that time a Gypsy band which has since disappeared. Their music was the first “orchestral sonority” that came to the ear of the child. . . . About 1800, some books of Hungarian dances were published in Vienna, one of which contained music “after several Gypsies from Galánta.” They have preserved the old Hungarian tradition. In order to continue it, the composer took his principal subjects from these ancient editions.
—Composer’s preface to the score

Kodály dedicated a major effort, along with his lifelong friend Béla Bartók, to collecting and preserving Hungarian folk tunes by recording them throughout the countryside. Many of these tunes provided source material for his own compositions. Kodály distrusted the accuracy of printed versions of folk tunes, preferring recordings of actual performances. But in the present case, the 1804 Viennese publication of Hungarian dances mentioned in his preface was his only link to an earlier tradition. It was to this collection that he turned when asked in 1933 to compose a dance suite in honor of the eightieth anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic, resulting in his Dances of Galánta.

The 1804 publication was a collection of verbunkos music, dances that originated in the second half of the eighteenth century to accompany the recruitment of men into the military. The verbunkos typically includes a slow introduction (lassú) and a section in a fast tempo (friss), with music characterized by the alternation of slow and fast figures even within a given tempo, dotted rhythms, syncopations, major-minor melodies, and wide melodic leaps. The dance steps likewise consisted of slow figures alternating with fast, and were performed by hussars accompanied by local or regimental Gypsy bands. The proceedings died out with conscription in 1849, but the musical form survived.

Kodály’s Dances of Galánta include many elements of the verbunkos tradition in addition to the modified tunes themselves. In general, the structural order of the lassú and friss is maintained although considerably enlarged. The introduction is permeated with a typical Hungarian dotted rhythm—long notes alternating with pairs of short notes—begun by the cellos. The Gypsy qualities (uncommon melodic steps, syncopations, etc.) are all present. The various dance tunes are strung together through the use of recurring material in the manner of a rondo. The clarinet, a typical instrument in Gypsy bands, is quite prominent in the work, but curiously the solo violin, the leader of such a band, is not; eventually the entire orchestra shares the virtuosity.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe

The composer has provided the following comments:
Holy Sisters: Part One (2012) for soprano, girls chorus, and chamber orchestra, was the initial brainchild of soprano Jessica Rivera who long harbored a wish for a piece that celebrated pivotal women characters from the Bible.  She found a kindred spirit in conductor Joana Carneiro who then approached me, requesting that I consider composing music to biblical texts arranged and reinterpreted by renowned Portuguese poet José Tolentino da Mendonça.  Around this time, my frequent collaborator Nilo Cruz, the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, and I had just been approached by the San Francisco Girls Chorus to also consider a collaboration with them… And well, the die was cast: I found a wonderful serendipity in bringing together so many fine talents to the table, counting among them genuinely close friends.

(And as if I needed further encouragement that this project had a special personal quality to it, I learned that Tolentino is also Padre Tolentino, longtime confidante and priest to the Carneiro family.)

I decided that Holy Sisters needed to be a two-part piece, with Padre Tolentino’s work sustaining the extended prelude, and Nilo’s contribution carrying the rest.  And while Part One would focus on personalities strictly from the Bible, Part Two (to be premiered in the spring of 2013) would focus on the myriad of “holy sisters” in Latin America who either enjoyed a looser relationship to the Bible (as in “folk Catholicism”) or operated in a different realm of spirituality altogether.   In this way, I could create an evening-length work that would beautifully suggest an Old World-New World pairing with one running theme: A vibrant portrayal of women’s faith.

To end on an anecdotal note: In the fall of 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal, Joana celebrated her marriage to soulmate José (“Zé”) Goncalves.  With the help of the soon-to-be-groom in selecting a text, Jessica and I were able to secretly conspire and bring to life a short song for soprano and string quartet (played by Joana’s siblings, also in on the plot!), surprising the bride at her own ceremony.  Honestly, it was great fun, but I didn’t have the last word on the matter: I was completely floored when Joana promptly and earnestly requested that this new wedding song – unabashedly direct in its lyricism and tonality – be included in Holy Sisters.   Another moment of serendipity as it turns out: The quasi-hymn that is the wedding song (“Today begins our salvation…”) aptly resolved creative issues of music and text that arose while Holy Sisters was coming to life in my studio; and I am happy that I could find a place for such a personal touch in the portrayal of characters who have long loomed so brilliantly.