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Written in fRoots issue 190, 1999

MUZSIKÁS
The Bartók Album
Hannibal HNCD 1439 (1999)

Many who listen to Béla Bartók’s compositions, which fall within that large, revered but ill-defined realm of music known as “classical”, are at most only dimly aware that he had some connections with folk music. Actually he wasn’t only one of twentieth century Europe’s most brilliant composers, he was probably its most exhaustive and influential collector of traditional songs and music, making written transcriptions, with enormous detail of the performance, every grace note and pitch variation, of many thousands of items, not only from Hungary but also from Slovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Turkey and North Africa.
      It was clear to Bartók that at the time classically trained musicians wouldn’t want to forsake their tone and intonation to discover that in the villages were musicians who had a completely different sense of these things, far from the neat equal temperament and pristine Stradivarity that had come to prevail in posh music, but it was their music that was the power behind his compositions, giving them the vibrancy and strangeness which came to so impress the classical establishment. Bartók was indeed a great originator, but he had the energy, discerning ear and open mind that gave him access to a huge melodic, rhythmic and harmonic storehouse most of his audience had not only never encountered but would probably have rejected as peasant scrapings if they had.
      The object of The Bartók Album is to give an idea of the Hungarian music that excited him and continues to excite the members of Muzsikás, and to show some of its effect in Bartók’s own compositions, specifically in three of his 44 tradition-inspired violin duos, which feature Muzsikás’ lead fiddler Mihály Sipos with Romanian-born classical violinist Alexander Balanescu. Virtually all the rest of the material on the album is drawn from Bartók’s collections. For this project Muzsikás and Sebestyén immerse themselves in the techniques and styles of the original performers rather than making conscious developments, to get close to the effect of what Bartók heard, and some of his original Edison phonograph field recordings are included, as in the sequence on tracks 16-18 of the same tune in phonograph, Muzsikás and Bartók versions.
      There are many fine Hungarian bands, but it sometimes seems that Muzsikás is the only one that World Music has heard of for its festivals and praise. There’s nevertheless absolutely no doubt that they deserve high status, and the fact that they’ve avoided fashion-ligging and made this album shows their class. Cherishing not just the notes but the people who made and still make it, they’re right inside this music which is so full of implied notes, subtleties of pitch, tone and sliding harmony that Bartók’s notation is the only way of getting close on paper. His transcriptions, though, are so detailed that they’re virtually impossible to play off the page, and without the detail much is lost, so the music’s only path into the future is alive, still being played and sung, and Muzsikás and Sebestyén know how to do that. I call track 19, Lads’ Dance From Fuzes, to give evidence.


© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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