MHL 603 – PREPARATION 9

(F-08)

Due 8 December via Email

Please read the following three essays:

Béla Bartók, “The influence of peasant music on modern music,” in Schwarz and Childs, Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (1967), 72-76, (1st published, 1931).

Béla Bartók, “On the significance of folk music,” S & C, 76-79.

Constant Lambert, “Nationalism and the modern scene,” Music Ho! (1936/1966), 151-163.

Write a couple of paragraphs in response to one of the following questions:

1. Explain in your own words the three methods that Bartók proposes by which “peasant music . . . becomes transmuted into modern music “ (p. 74). Give an example of each of these methods from the assigned listening or from music you know from elsewhere.

2. Review Lambert’s and Bartók’s comments on the incompatibility of modern harmonies and folk melodies (Lambert, p.155; Bartók, p.77). Is their reasoning the same or different? Is it fair for Lambert to criticize Bartok’s music on this basis? Refer in your discussion to Bartók’s Improvisations, Op. 20 and the first movement of his 5^th string quartet.

3. Lambert argues that by the 1930s folk music had become “artificial,” replaced in Europe and America by international popular styles (156-57). Does it follow that folk music is no longer a viable source for modern music? Lambert doesn’t say so, but would pop music be a better source?

Send your paragraph (or two) to jspitzer@sfcm.edu by Monday 8 Dec at 6 PM. This is the last preparation of the semester. Hooray! I want to compliment all of you on the mostly timely and often thoughtful work you’ve put in on them.