MUSIC CHRONICLE
645
of his people, who although Asiatic in orIgm are not gipsies, Bartok
went into the Magyar back-country and among the neighboring Slav
peoples to compile a collection of recorded and transcribed folk melo–
dies, many of them several hundred years old. These melodies, like those
which Falla found among the Spanish peasants, are not harmonized
according to modern classic-romantic conventions; they are intervallic
in structure, as rugged in their intervals as the sounds of the instruments,
such as bagpipe and cembalom, on which in isolated villages they were
still being played. Around these melodies, their non-diatonic, often disso–
nant intervals, and the sounds of the instruments native to them Bartok
composed the large body of his early compositions, notably the many
sets of small piano pieces. Through all his piano writing, except the
etudes that show the influence of Liszt's most impersonal style, the sounds
of cembalom and bagpipe are heard. Bartok edited several volumes of
the works of Couperin, Scarlatti, and Bach, and transcribed in a heavy
chordal manner, less flexible than that of Busoni, works by Rossi, Ciaia,
and Purcell. This experience in baroque keyboard music helped him
in
adapting rugged folk melodies to a pianistic style.
During these earlier years Bartok produced many compositions which
because of Stravinsky's more rapid rise to world-wide recognition have
been attributed to his influence. The fact is that Bartok came to them
first. The Fourth Bagatelle
(Ma mie qui .danse),
written in 1908, anti–
cipates the dry Waltz of Stravinsky's
Tale of a Soldier
(1918); the prim–
itive power and percussive attack of Allegro Barbaro, woven around
by fragmentary melodies, occur in the same year as
The Rites of Spring.
The tone-quality of the cembalom at a later time inspired Stravinsky
also; he included the instrument in minor compositions and in one of
the schemes for orchestrating
Les Noces
but came instead like Bartok
to a percussive approximation, using four pianos. That either composer
learned from the other is problematical; certainly the developing tech–
nique of Bartok drew less upon Stravinsky than upon Schoenberg.
Schoenberg's is an art of melody, fragmented and reconstituted,
and in the process broken clear of diatonic harmony. Through the use
of non-diatonic successions of intervals Bartok had come, like Debussy, to
a point where he must find some other means of structural orientation.
What would go by itself in the piano pieces needed a new vital means of
organization to become large. Such a means was created by Schoenberg
in the twelve-tone technic (or as he prefers to call it, "method of com–
posing with twelve tones").
Bartok did not come easily to the twelve-tone technic and never
fully submitted to its exclusive principles. The early one-act opera
Blue-
