A 70 éves Kárpáti János tiszteletére
Muszorgszkij és a Kelet : egzotikum és modalitás 127. - 139. o
Papp Márta abstract
Musorgsky and the East
Exoticism and Modality
Márta Papp

The use of modal scales and harmonies is an essential characteristic of Modest Musorgsky’s first opera Salambo with its exotic subject as well as in his other Oriental compositions (above all Yevreyskaya Pesnya, 1867). The modal variability of these works is unique among the exotic compositions of 19th century Russian music. The paper refers to the modal-polymodal characteristics of Salambo and Yevreyskaya Pesnya, and tries to answer the question of where the musical vein for modality comes from in Musorgsky and what was to become of it after the composer has ceased writing such exotic pieces.
Liszt 1839-es római Palestrina-élménye : Fortunato Santini könyvtára 141. - 154. o
Domokos Zsuzsa abstract
Liszt’s Roman Experience of Palestrina in 1839
The importance of Fortunato Santini’s library
Zsuzsanna Domokos

This study focuses on Liszt’s first Roman period in the first part of the year 1839 and his first experiences of the Palestrina-interpretation in the Cappella Sistina, as well as his acquaintance with Fortunato Santini, which so far has not been researched in the Liszt-literature. Fortunato Santini’s rich and very valuable library of autographs, first editions of Palestrina’s works, and many manuscript copies prepared in the most important Roman archives by Santini himself, plus the evening concerts held in his home, served as a starting point for Italian and foreign musicians of the time to research 16th century music. Among the visitors we find Liszt, Cramer, Fétis, Mendelssohn, Otto Nicolai and Vadimir Stasov. This study gives a brief description of the Santini-collection and summarizes all the information obtained from various sources which give a more precise insight into the personal relationship between Liszt and Santini and into the repertoire which Liszt might have studied during his first Roman sojourn.
A Zeneakadémia Olvasóköre 1891-1907 155. - 165. o
Gádor Ágnes; Szirányi Gábor abstract
Der Leseverein der Musikakademie 1890/91-1906/07
Ágnes Gádor – Gábor Szirányi

Die im Jahre 1875 gegründete Musikakademie hatte in ihrer Bibliothek nur Musikalien und fast keine Bücher. Die besten Studenten gründeten deshalb einen Leseverein, wo sie für den Mitgliedsbeitrag Bücher kauften. Später wurden die Aktivitäten erweitert, der Verein veranstaltete Konzerte, Vorlesungen, eine Studienreise nach Bayreuth. In den Konzerten waren auch Uraufführungen zu hören, ein Sonatensatz von Béla Bartók wurde auch in einem solchen Konzert uraufgeführt. Vor allem Studenten der Fächer Klavier und Komposition waren in dem Verein aktiv; die Lehrer und der Direktor Ödön Mihalovich führten immer streng Aufsicht über die Aktivitäten des Vereins. Als das neue Gebäude der Musikakademie 1907 mit der grossen Bibliothekssaal übergeben wurde, wurde der Buchbestand des Lesevereins in den Bestand der grossen Bibliothek einverleibt und von nun an kann man im Falle der Musikakademie über eine richtige Musikbibliothek sprechen.
Lajtha-körkép - Párizs, 1968 : nyugat-európai és magyar alkotói kapcsolatok a Lajtha-memoárok tükrében (1929-1963) 167. - 179. o
Berlász Melinda abstract
Remembering Lajtha – Paris, 1968
An Historical Assessment of the Lajtha Memoirs by his West European and Hungarian Contemporaries (1929-1963)
Melinda Berlász

In the years after László Lajtha’s death, ten contemporary artists – Lajtha’s friends and acquaintances – paid tribute to the late Hungarian composer in recollections upon the initiative of János Gergely, editor of the French-language periodical Études Finno-Ougriennes. Eight of the writers were West European composers and ethnomusicologists working in the sphere of attraction of Paris culture (Henry Barraud, Emmanuel Bondeville, Jacques Chailley, Alphones Claude Leduc, Salvador de Madariaga, Albert Marinus, Marcel Mihalovici, A. Adnan Saygun), with two contemporaries representing the Hungarian colleagues (Sándor Veress and Lajos Vargyas).
These remembrances preserve a multitude of facts and personal characteristics of Lajtha: through them, the Hungarian composer’s presence in Paris – which, though sporadic, spanned several decades –, his contacts with his contemporaries and the network of events he was involved in become realistically clarified. In the light of this foreign viewpoint, the often vague and idealized Hungarian | French cooperation concerning Lajtha can clear up important questions of his biography and the genesis of compositions. The writings published in 1968 failed to be included in that-time or later Hungarian research literature on Lajtha, principally because the periodical was unknown.
The paper is to interpret the personal relations between Lajtha and his contemporary creators, pointing our their importance for international art and science. The author also plans to publish the collection of memoirs in Hungarian and English languages.
Ötös ritmika Bartók zenéjében 181. - 208. o
Vikárius László abstract
Rhythmic and Metric Fifths in Bartók’s Composition
László Vikárius

The article explores Bartók’s conspicuous and varied use of rhythmic and metric units comprising fifths, which clearly contributed to his innovative and personal idiom. Fifths may appear as quintuplets on several rhythmic levels or as 5/8 and 5/4 time. Although at first sight a category like this may appear to be a rather mixed and heterogeneous collection of unrelated rhythmic phenomena, a closer view makes it possible to draw up a useful typology of significantly fewer groups of passages, related to one another, in works form different periods of Bartók’s career. At the same time, however questionable the inclusion of both rhythmic and metric fifths may appear, their joint examination is not only justified by their similar opposition to conventional means of the Western art music tradition but by a few cases as well where the occasional use of a quintuplet or a change into a five-beat time could be interchangeable. The typology set up in the article (see tables 1 & 2) consists of the following rubrics: (1) rhythmic fifths: (a) in accompaniment: Within accompanimental arpeggios; within passagework; repeated figurations; continuous accompanimental figure; (b) in the foreground: as folk-music based thematic material; as ornament (trill, Doppelschlag, etc.); upbeat figuration; figuration at phrase end; thematic arpeggio; as declamatory passage; as isolated gesture; as main motif; (2) metric fifths: (a) 5/4 time: connected to the sung text; distorted dance; expression of strangeness; other passages; (b) 5/8 time> connected to the sung words; as a result of rhythmic transformation (compression); within changing time (“colindā rhythm”); and fast passage in continuous 5/8 time. Most significant of all, and most personal in character, seems to be the use of a quintuplet motif combined with repeated notes and a minor third leap (e.g. Ex. 18, Sonata for two pianos and percussion, 2nd mvt., bb. 28-33 and Ex. 20a, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, beginning of the Seventh Door scene).
The article is introduced by a discussion of four passages in 5/4 time appearing in 19th century compositions (Chopin, Sonata for piano in C minor, 2nd movement; Tchaikowsky, 6th Symphony in B minor, 2nd movement; Dohnányi, Piano Quintet op. 1, Finale and Wagner, a passage in the 3rd Act of Tristan and Isolde), all mentioned by Bartók in either his lecture, “The So-called Bulgarian Rhythm” (1938) or in an early personal letter of 1907. In connection with these examples as well as both innovative and personal features of his use of rhythmic fifths, his employment of what he called “Bulgarian rhythm” is also discussed.
Cage és a haiku 209. - 218. o
Wilheim András abstract
Cage and Haiku
András Wilheim

By exploring in Cage’s works a verse form used variedly by the composer and its forms and various transformations, this paper attempts to identify the role played by an extrinsic device or the illusions related thereto in the formation of music. How is it possible to convert rules and formal features into musical patterns that had previously applied to another type of material? Does it matter if a composer makes minor mistakes in the philological interpretation of the device or forms selected as a source? In the case of Cage – and this may also hold true for similar phenomena regarding other composers – haiku really seems to be a starting point only, a special way of pre-arranging the material, and its validity should not be originated from or contrasted with the traditions of haiku; it should be perceived that its justification lies in the works of Cage themselves. For Cage, Japanese verse forms (or rather what he makes of them) formed part of the toolbox just like other elements of his style – the fact that he referred to them with such emphasis does not owe its significance to composition technique but to poetics.
Tanulmány
„…sans ton ni mesure” : egy halálszimbólum Liszt zenéjében? (Ford. Kovács Pál) 219. - 236. o
Merrick, Paul abstract
»…sans ton ni mesure«
A symbol of death in Liszt?
Paul Merrick

The early piano piece Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses (S154) begins without a key signature. But, as we learn from a study of the sources by Adrienne Kaczmarczyk, the draft contains a key signature of 2 flats signifying g minor, which Liszt removed before publication in 1835. Earlier, in 1833, he had referred to the music as being “sans ton ni mesure”. Twenty years later Liszt gave the same music, still without a signature, the title Pensée des morts. Was there a connection in the composer’s mind between the concept of “no tonality”, the removal of the written key signature, and the subject of death? An examination of over 300 works reveals that only in 84 instances does Liszt write either a passage or a whole piece without key signature. Most of these examples have a content associated with death. The article explores the probability that in Liszt’s notation the removal of the key signature constitutes a programmatic symbol.
Szabolcsi Bence és a magyar zeneélet diskurzusai (1948-1956) [II. rész] 237. - 256. o
Péteri Lóránt abstract
Bence Szabolcsi and the Discourse of Hungarian Musical Life 1948-56
Lóránt Péterfi

Based on archival and press sources and on the writings of Bence Szabolcsi, this paper raises and discusses questions pertinent to talking and writing on music as a part of a doctrinally determined discourse. In Hungarian musical life, there were two main ideologies to possess the public discourse after the unconcealed communist takeover (1948): Zoltán Kodály’s concept on the hand, and the late Stalinist (Zhdanovian) aesthetics on the other. One of the purposes of his paper is to reveal the different feasible strategies of the participants of the discourse on music after 1948. In doing so, the author focuses on the case of Bence Szabolcsi (1899-1973).
Szabolcsi, the historian of music was a follower of Kodály’s scholarly idea about the combination of folk music and musical historiography and he accepted his master’s aesthetic called folkloristic national classicism. He was also inspired by Wilhelm Dilthey’s Geistesgeschichte, which earned him a dubious reputation in communist political circles after 1948. Nevertheless his earlier view of ‘art music’ as based on folk and popular genres was accommodated in post-Zhdanovian musical thinking. In the first years following the communist takeover Szabolcsi’s status was ambiguous, but by 1951, as the president of the Hungarian Musicians’ Association, and as the head of the newly established musicological institutions, he had become a figurehead of the country’s Stalinist musical life.
Part 1 offers an explanation of how the “sovietization” of Hungarian musicology resulted in apparently much less change and upheaval than the the introduction of communist rule in other cultural and intellectual areas. It seems, that the relative stability and continuity of the musicological field rested to a great extent on overlapping aesthetic and academic-educational agendas of the most powerful professional personalities of the field and of the cultural-political management of high Stalinism. However the conspicuous strength of Szabolcsi and Kodály was also due to their central positions in the informal networks of Hungarian musical life.
Analysing Szabolcsi’s writings from the 1950s, Part 2 reveals the different ways in which the writing of music history can be instrumental in the affirmation of a politically established canon. Part 3 focuses on Szabolcsi’s direct statements on contemporary Hungarian composition, and examines some of his historical studies as an indirect contribution to the debates surrounding it.
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