Strings’ was to combine percussion with strings which were customarily associated with romantic warmth (at least this many decades before Psycho.) A love of Bach could be thought to inspire the opening of this work. But the expanding nature of fugue also expresses Bartók’s sense of ‘organic growth’. The work begins very simply with a chromatic figure in the violas (a chromaticism that Herrmann alludes to in Psycho when Marion suggests that Norman put his mother in a home). This melody expands and is added to (top and bottom) as more and more instruments enter. Finally, the apex is reached, with forte ringing out of the note E-flat, tonally the furthest remove from the opening note of ‘a’. ‘Apex’ is an apt word. One of Bartók’s customary forms was the arch. But it’s an arch in sound. The post-climax music is not an exact mirror of the opening. Real time demands abbreviation. There is some obeying of natural law here but it was probably instinctive: Bartók didn’t have Xenakis’ engineering degree. In the second movement, Bartók’s ingenious layout of forces becomes more obvious, with antiphonal use of groups. This sonata-form movement possesses some of the character of traditional Magyar dance. Although not as scientifically penetrating as Xenakis, Bartók too sought an identification with nature in much of his music. The third movement is one of Bartók’s ‘night musics’ – a term used to describe Bartók’s frequent slow-movement evocations of the insect-like mosaics of sound, flurries and arabesques you might hear in the night air. In the finale of this work, the four ‘breaths’ of the opening’s fugue provide the material for the episodes between returns of the rondo subject. The emotionally-satisfying climax is provided by expansion of the chromatically-wound fugal subject of the first movement into a diatonic statement. ‘Nothing forces us to acquire knowledge as effectively as pain,’ to paraphrase Aeschylus. And this could apply to the dramatic plots of American Beauty and Psycho and even the lives of Xenakis and Bartók (who defied, then fled Nazi-aligned Hungary in 1940). But the end-result of the Greek drama was actually catharsis, one self-aware step beyond ruin. The diatonic climax of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta provides that, as does the eruption into odd melody in Voile. But they probably spring as much, if not more, from their composers’ immersion in the wellsprings of their musical environments, than a desire to accompany a film or fulfil a tragic vision. Gordon Kalton Williams © 2016
23