Mûhelybeszélgetés
"A teljes életre tanít" : beszélgetés Kocsis Zoltánnal Arnold Schönberg Mózes és Áron címû operájáról és az általa komponált harmadik felvonásról 253. - 276. o
Szitha Tünde abstract
”It Teaches Us to Live Our Life as a Whole” Zoltán Kocsis talks about Schönberg’s Moses and Aron and the third act composed by him Tünde Szitha   In the summer of 2009 Zoltán Kocsis completed Arnold Schönberg's unfinished opera Moses and Aron with a third act, closely following the libretto the composer had left behind. This completed version was premiered by the National Philhar­monic Orchestra and Chorus featuring Wolfgang Schöne as Moses and Daniel Brenna as Aron) on 16th January, 2010 in Budapest, conducted by Zoltán Kocsis. This interview is focused on the motivation and compositional methods of his work. Kocsis accepts the general judgement of the musical world, which regards Moses and Aron as one of the most complete „unfinished works" of music history. However, in the course of the Hungarian premiere of the original form at the Miskolc National Opera Festival (2009) he experienced the theatrical and musical absurdity of performing the third act in prose form. Although Schönberg had authorized the staging of the third act in this way, according to Kocsis the speech mode equalizes the role and dramatic power of the personalities of Moses and Aron, firmly distinguished by Sprechgesang and bel canto singing in the first and second acts. This was the first motive that prompted him to write a score. The other was his desire to find a strong musical reply to the fiasco of Moses, to answer his open-ended sentence „O Wort, du Wort, was du mir fehlst..." and to expand the two dimensions of the first two acts (Moses: canon and discipline – Aron/people: pragmatism, caducity and outrage) with a third one (God: trans­cendency and judgement), which can be detected in the libretto. The most important task for Kocsis was to compose the third act to Schön­berg's music as coherently as possible from the distance of almost eight decades. He made use of the three fragments of sketches preserved in the Arnold Schön­berg Center in Vienna; he composed his own inventions as well in the system of consequent dodecaphony; he maintained the twelve-tone Reihe of the opera as a basic structural and melodic principle; he quoted the six-chord opening phrase of the first act in several forms of variations as the icon of the divine canon; and at several points he used quotations, allusions and paraphrases from the first two acts. Nevertheless he considers the third act as his own music with strong re­ferences to Schönberg. He invented a number of illustrative instrumental inter­ludes to depict the visual element of the libretto, included a passage of jazz cross­talk in Moses' last scene (which has more connection with contemporary jazz style, than with Schönberg's era), and - by giving a central role to F sharp almost throughout the act - he effected a melodic and harmonic release at the end of the opera: as a symbol of God this motif leads the marching people forward to the desert and affords resignation to Moses.
Tanulmány
Autonómia és kimondhatatlanság 277. - 293. o
Csobó Péter György abstract
Philosophers of music often say musicologists don't understand in fact very exactly what they describe, whereas musicologists time and again assert that philoso­phers aren't competent in music interpretation. The paper discusses the relation­ships between musical meaning and the traditional concept of musical autonomy to attempt to illuminate the background and the causes of this old debate. The reasoning around this problem goes back to the 19th century. To explain how mu­sical text can have meaning, and what kind of meaning music in general can have, in the 19th century traditional music interpretation invoked the concept of inef­fability. This concept was based on the specific relation of music and language, and grounded in the concept of absolute music's non-conceptual character, and accordingly of the autonomy of music. So there arose a tension between 'form' and 'expression', between the immanent formalist relations of musical structure and the dynamic expressivity of music with reference to an object external to it. However, every traditional variant of ineffability - the concept of music as a supplement of language and that of a „specific musical language" are analysed he­re - had to presuppose a primary musical experience and at the same time pro­claim it inaccessible. The assumption of an absolute difference between music and non-music (objects, meanings, ideas, discourse, etc.) was - by every indi­cation - a „logical failure" of music interpretation. So it seems to be a more acceptable concept of the possibility of musical meaning, if we abandon the respectable principle of „pure musical", and look for possibilities of music inter­pretation in the interaction of the disparate sensual modality, mediums and forms of communication.
Egy népzenei közjáték jelentései Haydn mûveiben 295. - 307. o
Riskó Kata abstract
In several Haydn works there is a musical topos which can be linked with instru­mental folk music interludes. In instrumental Hungarian folk music there is a method of connecting melodies and augmenting forms by iteration of a motif. Similar interludes notated in a more schematic form can be found in written dance music sources from the 18th century. In terms of folk music and historical sources, interludes of this type were also present in the age of Haydn in the music of the other nations living near Eszterháza, such as Austrians, Croatians, Slovak­ians and Bohemians. Haydn used this type not to represent any particular nation but as a generalized topos which could play several roles in his works. He worked out this type in several styles and gave it various structural functions according to the character and musical content of the whole work. In the most interesting cases Haydn used this type of interlude and its transformations inspired by folk music traditions to embody special formal concepts. In the fourth movement of the theatre symphony No.60 (finished before 1774) this interlude theme appears as a separate dance-episode which illustrates a phase of the dramatic action. The same theme is first given a Turkish flavour in the Hun­garian context of the Rondo all' ongharese finale of the D major piano concerto, then it becomes Hungarian according to Haydn's formal concept. A similar transforma­tion of the theme is promoted to become the structural and narrative basis of a whole movement in the finale of Symphony No.82 (,,The Bear"). The interlude-theme plays a less important role in Symphony No.92 (the „Oxford" symphony): it emerges as a contradanse-like motif closing the first group of themes. Finally, in the op.74 (C major) and op.76 (D minor) quartets of the 1790s Haydn again emphasized the Hungarian, gipsy character of this interlude theme. Moreover, in the D minor quartet he used a later variation of the instrumental practice of his time, presenting the minor movement in a major key, a concept which is a peculiarity of the whole work.
Erkel és Kodály 308. - 316. o
Bónis Ferenc abstract
Representatives of new times with new things to say generally dissociate them­selves from the great figures of the preceding period. This behaviour is natural, since they have to declare in some way that they seek something different from what their predecessors aspired to. Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967), as in many other aspects of his life and work, was unusual in this respect also. While his creative activity opened a new chapter in the history of Hungarian art, scholarship and pedagogy, in his literary and journalistic works he sought those threads that link him and his efforts with the great known or unknown masters of the past. In other words, he consciously searched for his intellectual ancestors. One of those intellectual predecessors was Ferenc Erkel (1810-1893), who in creating Hun­garian historical opera created a bridge between that art form and Hungarian soci­ety, and who in his folk-drama music, which included folksongs too, likewise marked out a path for his successors to follow. In the course of 45 years Kodály in his writings chose Erkel as his subject on 21 occasions, analysing Erkel's place in the historical development of Hungarian music. The present study is an attempt to summarize those various writings.
Az új sensus communis - Kodálytól Rajeczkyig 317. - 327. o
Kiss Gábor abstract
Like others, Benjamin Rajeczky was strongly inspired by Kodály's thesis, formu­lated in 1933, about the relationship between folk music and music history. For himself, Rajeczky drew conclusions concerning possible connections between plainchant and folk music and the usefulness of studying them simultaneously. It was ten years later that he first commented on the desirability of linking the two areas, adjusting his argumentation explicitly to Kodály's ideas. Although direct references to Kodály were later omitted, several articles were published in the subsequent decades in which Rajeczky discussed essentially the same issue, trying to elaborate and extend it with further considerations and information. This paper is intended to give an overview and evaluation of this decades-long intellectual process, which though monothematic was nevertheless open to new developments in the history of domestic and international scholarship. In this outline the following questions, among others, will be discussed: to what extent Kodály's basic assumptions were rooted in the special characteristics of Hun­garian music history and folk music tradition, or to what extent they can be re­garded as independent and as postulates of general validity, and whether we can regard Rajecky's ideas about the connection of plainchant and folk music as a logical continuation of Kodály's thesis or rather as independent adaptations of them, partly under the influence of developments in international scholarship.
"Már nem is csupán zenei probléma" : a népzene mint forrás Csíky Boldizsár mûveiben 328. - 350. o
Németh G. István abstract
Romanian composer of Hungarian descent Boldizsár Csíky (1937) has written ever since 1958 compositions infatuated with Transylvanian folk music. This study presents through the rather extraordinary example of Csíky the way the entire school of Transylvanian composers from the 2nd half of the 20th century dealt with folk music. The analysis examines first Csíky's aesthetic beliefs in terms of the relationship between art music and folk music, which exhibit the features of an es­sentially conservative avant-gardism, being obviously modelled on Béla Bartók's music. Csíky's series of some 20 folk music arrangements (1962-1979) was ex­clusively commissioned by the Marosvásárhely (Tg. Mure_/Romania) State Folk Ensemble (and performed by singer Erzsébet Tóth). The study also includes an indepth investigation regarding the history of this institution, which was founded in 1956-57, and during its heyday operated under the dual influence of the Moiseyev Dance Company of the USSR and of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble of Budapest/ Hungary. The latter opened in 1951 with, among other pieces, Zoltán Kodály's Kálló Double Dance, a composition that thus became the main model for the composers active in Marosvásárhely. Csíky stopped composing folk song arrangements once the táncház (dance hall) movement arose in the early 1980s, consequently the historical review of the Marosvásárhely State Folk Ensemble also deals with the polemics connected the representation of folk music and dance on stage without any artificial (compositional or choreographic) additions to them. The musical analysis demon­strates the subtle, though evident connections of Csíky's compositional methods used both in his folk song arrangements and his compositions intended for concert hall audiences. The final section takes a closer look at Csíky's abstract compositions written after 1980, including the Piccola musica ebraica per motivi transsylvanici di Marmarosch, commissioned in 2001 by a Swiss chamber ensemble, which shows the validity of Csíky compositional methods developed during the period of his earlier folk music arrangements. Data on genre, scoring, manuscript sources, commercial recordings and performance history of the pieces can be seen in the detailed cata­logue of Csíky's folksong arrangements at the end of the article.
Mûhelytanulmány
Ligeti György zongoraetûdjeirõl I. 355. - 367. o
Marczi Mariann abstract
Work on the doctoral thesis (DLA) by Mariann Marczi discussing György Ligeti's piano etudes started in the spring of 2005 and ended in 2008. The central part of the thesis includes analyses of the three books of Ligeti's etudes, altogether 18 pieces. This number of the magazine features the chapter dealing with the ars poe­tica of Ligeti's etudes (the Hungarian translation of three Ligeti texts), and the chapter summing up the results of the analyses. The latter discusses the message of Ligeti's etudes, the influence of his childhood experiences on his compositional methods, and the importance of the sources of inspiration frequently mentioned by Ligeti himself. The author considered it important to highlight the following influences among the many: the works of Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, De­bussy and the folk music of the Balkans, from the European tradition; Central African, Javan, Sumatran, Gamelan, Cuban and jazz music, from non-European musical traditions; Conlon Nancarrow's etudes for mechanical piano, from contemporary music literature; Maurits Escher's graphics, from fine arts; the structure of mathematical fractals from science; and the works of D. R. Hofstadter from philosophy. (Analyses of two etudes will appear in the next number of Magyar Zene.)
Recenzió
Vezetõkkel a Bánk bán-Labirintusban : Erkel Ferenc: Bánk bán. Opera három felvonásban Közreadta és bevezette: Dolinszky Miklós. (Erkel Ferenc Operái 3.) 369. - 375. o
Kaczmarczyk Adrienne
Close