Konferencia Szendrei Janka tiszteletére
Az utolsó Bartók-partitúrák és a "klasszikus" stílus értelmezései 3. - 13. o
Somfai László abstract
The "Classical" Last Scores of Béla Bartók
László Somfai

The success of Bartók's last compositions written in the USA (Concerto for Orchestra 1943, Sonata for Solo Violin 1944, Third Piano Concerto 1945) irritated the progressive music scene in the 1950s. According to post-war leaders of new music (Leibowitz, Scherchen, Boulez, etc.), these scores represented a "path of compromise" for the USA listener. This study demonstrates that Bartók's method in composition radically changed in America, which influenced the general impression of the new works. He missed the perfect isolation of his studio for improvisation at the piano, a precondition for composition in Budapest. In America he could best work on new scores during his holidays in Saranac Lake, NY, or in Ashville, NC (see the table). Writing the draft notation, now Bartók switched from ink to pencil, outlined his new compositions in shorter thematic blocks (see examples 1-4). Besides, Bartók's anxiety about the fate of the people in Hungary and Europe was an important motivation when he adopted folklore imaginaire themes, stylistic references, and created the narrative of the major wartime compositions while a stylistic compromise for the American audience was not. The characteristic titles of the movements, however, can be marked as an aide to the listener. Incidentally, each of the three late scores has its own motivation and this crucially influenced the concept and the style: after a long period he wrote a large-scale symphonic work, made a violin solo inspired by Menuhin's Bach rendition, elaborated a concerto not for the pianist-composer himself but for his wife Ditta.
Performansz-típusok a sintó vallás szertartásaiban 15. - 32. o
Kárpáti János abstract
Performance Typology in Japanese Shinto Ritual Kagura
János Kárpáti

The ceremony of Shintô religion named kagura, accompanied by music and dancing, has a thousand year old tradition. Departing from the classification stamped by the name of Prof. Yasuji Honda, I am proposing a more distinctive classification according to types of the performance, supported by musical structures as well. As an issue of my research, I am proposing a new classification based upon the place and persons where and by whome kagura is performed, and upon the use or non-use of masks. Considering these criteria, we get three basic classes: (1) court kagura, a ritual with dance, without mask, (2) shrine kagura performed in or in front of a shrine, without mask and/or with mask and dance, (3) stage kagura, a ritual play with mask and dance.
Bartha Dénes-Konferencia
A zenetörténet antológiája vagy régi zenetörténet-írás? : megjegyzések Bartha Dénes munkájának eredeti kiadásához 33. - 54. o
Vikárius László abstract
Anthology-Cum-History of Music: Remarks on Dénes Bartha's Historical Anthology of Early Music (1948)
László Vikárius

In 1940, Bence Szabolcsi (1899-1973) published the first edition of his full-length history of music (A zene története), a book that could justifiably be characterized as a work of Geisteswissenschaft or spiritual history by one of the author's closest Hungarian colleague Dénes Bartha (1908-1993). In his slim volume of Régi muzsika kertje (Garden of early music), published in 1947, Szabolcsi presented a selection of texts from the history of music and, in the same year, did his A magyar zenetörténet kézikönyve (in English: A Concise History of Hungarian Music, 1964) appear that, apart from the historical study - the main body of the book - included a large selection of musical compositions with commentaries. Bartha's A zenetörténet antológiája (A historical anthology of music) published in 1948, contained a series of 135 numbered items, entire compositions as well as selected movements or self-contained parts of musical works, to illustrate the history of music from what was understood as "primitive" music to Bach. Bartha's anthology, compiled almost simultaneously with, but independently of, the well-known Historical Anthology by Davison and Apel (vol. 1, 1946, vol. 2, 1950), had few models, such as Riemann's Musikgeschichte in Beispielen (1912), Einstein's little Beispielsammlung zur älteren Musikgeschichte (1917, and later editions) and Arnold Schering's Geschichte der Musik in Beispielen. Bartha, as it transpires from his own extensive philological and historical notes to the individual examples, also consulted the Anthologie sonore, a large series of 78 rpm records initiated by Curt Sachs in Paris in 1934. Bartha's anthology has since remained in use in Hungary, although mainly in its second revised edition of 1974, edited by Tibor Tallián, in which Bartha's very detailed descriptions and analyses of the individual pieces were significantly trimmed to update the collection both in references and in style. Interestingly, however, Bartha himself harboured the idea of issuing a new and completely revised, up-to-date collection. The somewhat compromised second printing, that now appears to have failed to represent the originality and pedagogical fervour of Bartha's original notes, was probably due to his unavailability for the task. After considering basic documents related to the planning, compilation and edition of the anthology, the article strives to retrieve Bartha's original intentions putting them in their historical context. The presentations of Binchois' De plus en plus by Schering and Bartha (no. 32 in the anthology) and the discussions of Perotin's four-voice clausula Mors and its three-voice motet version in the Bamberg Codex, Mors quae stimulo/Mors morsu/Mors (no. 17) in Szabolcsi's 1940 study and Bartha's notes are compared in some detail. The appendix presents Bartha's full commentary on no. 17 in the anthology as well as his fragmentary plan for a new edition of the collection, a hitherto unknown document preserved in the National Széchényi Library, Budapest.
"Kicsoda hengeríti el nekünk a követ?" : ami egy huszonöt évvel ezelőtti előadásból kimaradt 55. - 60. o
Ferenczi Ilona abstract
"Who Will Roll Away the Stone for Us?"
A supplement to a paper presented 25 years ago
Ilona Ferenczi

When celebrating Dénes Bartha's 75th birthday (1983) I had the opportunity to present a paper on my then recent opinion about the fragment in the cover of the Vietoris Tablature Book (dating from around 1675). Contrary to previous claims, the material taken from the cover does not contain 18th century pieces but mainly hymns in the Slovak language which recur in the Vietoris Tablature Book with or without changes. There is, however, another fragment in the material, as well: the Slovak translation of the Easter Dialogue by A. Hammerschmidt. Taking this fragmentary source as a starting point, the present paper discusses the ethnic problems in the history of Hungarian music and the necessity of changing our approach to history. It is done with the conviction that the appropriate assessment of history still poses a problem and that not only outside the borders of Hungary.
De tonorum cognitione : tonális változatok a késő középkori miserepertoárban 61. - 72. o
Kiss Gábor abstract
De tonorum cognitione
- tonal variants in late medieval repertory of the Mass
Gábor Kiss

One of the most exciting facet of medieval concepts about music are the efforts to rationalize, categorize and record the melodies. The employment of the system of modes caused serious difficulties to a melody repertory that was transmitted orally and was not developed under the rules of the 8th-mode system, defined only at a later stage. The desire for a categorization of the melodies became specially strong with the introduction of staff notation. The melodies or parts of melodies that did not fit in the system were qualified as extraordinary by contemporary theorists. Two methods were used to resolve such conflicts: the introduction of 'extra' tones on the one hand and the changing of the melodies on the other, adapting them in this way to the system. Some kind of interaction between musical memory, theoretical categorization and notation remained (continued) even in the late Middle Ages. In late medieval sources we can find a large number of tonally ambivalent melodies that were not referred to in the earlier treatises. Nevertheless, in these examples the same duality of spontaneous musical reproduction and rationalizing shows itself as can be observed in the theoretical writings mentioned above. In the alternative tonal classifications different decisions and preferences are concealed, concerning the perception and interpretation of the melodies. The inherited 'decisions' became generally fixed and preserved in the different local traditions, consequently these variants are useful means in the comparative examination of the sources and source groups. While some of the variants are only mere transpositions, in other cases the alternative classifications are connected to different and more individual versions of the same melody. The aim of this study is to present several types of tonal variants found primarily in late Central European sources for the Mass.
Egykorú beszámolók Hunyadi Mátyás és Aragóniai Beatrix esküvőjéről : forráskapcsolatok és ezekből adódó zenetudományi következmények 73. - 83. o
Király Péter abstract
Contemporary Reports of the Wedding of Mathias Corvinus, King of Hungary, and Beatrice of Aragon
Unrecognized dependences among the sources and their musicological consequences
Péter Király

The contemporary German reports of the Hungarian royal wedding of 1476 are well known to historians. Scholars specializing in different fields of cultural history have frequently used and analysed these documents. But since their research has been focused on what the sources tell about the wedding, about the artefacts etc., and, at the same time, not much interest has been devoted to the sources themselves, it has remained unrecognised that three of the four reports from Germanic lands have a common origin. In fact these three (two of them in German and one in Latin) derive from an unknown common source, probably a Latin description of the festivities. Between the three versions there are significant differences, due to the translation as well as resulting from the rewriting and reorganizing of the text. The differences are not without importance for any kind of research, including musicology.
The present philological study shows that the differences in the sources concerning the music of the wedding celebrations, which until now have been considered as differences due to the personal observations of different eyewitnesses, should in fact be reclassified as the result of reworkings by unknown scribes, although it is impossible to decide which version best follows the unknown original.
Nápoly - Kismarton - Győr : Nicolò Conforto áriáinak kontrafaktumai Istvánffy Benedek kézírásában 85. - 109. o
Farkas Zoltán abstract
Neapel - Eisenstadt - Győr (RAAB)
Contrafacta of Arias by Nicoló Conforto in Benedek Istvánffy's Copy
Zoltán Farkas

In the early 1980s the Hungarian musicological research unfolded the life and work of probably the most gifted Hungarian composer of the time, Benedek Istvánffy (1733-1778), Kapellmeister and organist at Győr (Raab) Cathedral. So far, to our present knowledge two masses and ten minor church works survive of his oeuvre, most of them are published in score and also available on recordings. The composer's biography is insufficiently documented, showing the greatest lacunae with respect to his formative years. At the same time a considerable number of indirect evidence supports a hypothesis about his relationship with the Esterházy court in Eisenstadt and its Kapellmeister Gregor Joseph Werner.
Istvánffy copied 144 musical sources fully or in part for the music collection of the Győr Cathedral, seven of them were composed by Nicoló Conforto (1718-1793). As Ágnes Sas convincingly argues, these also refer to the Hungarian composer's relationship with the Esterházy court, given that Conforto's compositions could not be found in such a great number in Central Eastern Europe's music collections. Apart from Győr, his works were known in Eisenstadt, too: as an envoy of the Austrian Empire to Naples, Count Pál Antal Esterházy became personally acquainted with the Italian master, and he even commissioned Conforto to compose a cantata for the birthday of the Empress Maria Theresa. He also aquired some operas and other compositions by Conforto and brought them to Hungary on his return. Katalin Kim-Szacsvay recognized that the seven sources in the Győr collection are contrafacta of Conforto's opera arias. She identified the original of four contrafacta (set on liturgical texts) with arias from Conforto's Antigono, the only opera surviving in the Esterházy music archives. This collection preserves two sources of the opera: a score (without recitatives) and parts of an instrumental transcription of the arias for trios and quartets (flute and strings), as for the prince himself could perform the main 'voice' on flute or violin. The author has scrutinized the Esterházy score and parts and compared them to the parts of the Győr contrafacta, and, respectively, consulted with another Naples source of the opera. As a result, he states that neither the Esterházy score nor the chamber music transcription could serve as a model (Vorlage) of the contrafacta. There is no conclusive evidence that Istvánffy should have been the author of the contrafacta but the modern idiom of Conforto's arias had surely a palpable and beneficial influence on his own music.
Néhai Eisikovits Herman Ligeti-kéziratai : avagy: svájci Dille kerestetik 111. - 120. o
László Ferenc abstract
Ligeti-Manuscripts of the Late Herman Eisikovits
or: a Swiss Dille wanted
Ferenc László

Dr. Herman EISIKOVITS (1923-1994) was a paediatrician in Kolozsvár (aka Cluj, Rumania), former grammar-school classmate and friend of György Ligeti, with whom he also played chamber music as a violoncellist. In the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basle there are not only his letters written later to Ligeti open for survey but also the music manuscripts of the composer dating from the beginning of his career which Eisikovits held onto until his old age and which had not been published earlier in the Ligeti literature. The contents of these music manuscripts include: (a) three early, previously unrecorded works of Ligeti, of which the first, the "Small Piano Trio" is a complete work, "In Memoriam Vivaldi" is a rather characteristic passage, and the third is an unnamed violoncello part of an unknown piece and (b) material supplementing two already recorded works (Arietta, Ostinato). The author firmly believes that the early compositions of Ligeti, which shed light on the issue of "what makes a composer" should be studied in detail, in the spirit of Denis Dille who devoted a highly work-intensive book to Bartók's compositions that had preceded Op. 1.
In the Appendix (New Data Complementing the Genesis of the "Six Bagatelles") of the paper the author rectifies, based on the results of research he did in the Paul Sacher Stiftung, his earlier assumptions regarding the first performance of the composition held on 13th April 1956 under the title "Five Bagatelles" (Ferenc Lász1ó: "Ligeti a hídon/Ligeti on the Bridge" in Magyar Zene, Vol. 41. 2003/4, pp. 361-374).
Close