Elliott Antokoletz to Discuss Béla Bartók's "Musical Language," on Wednesday, November 17, 4:30 P.M., in Bibbins 223
			The music of Béla Bartók will be the focus when Elliott Antokoletz, Professor of Musicology at the University of Texas-Austin, visits Oberlin on Wednesday, November 17. Antokoletz will offer a string coaching session, followed by a talk entitled "The Evolution of Bartók's Musical Language: Toward Synthesis of Divergent Folk and Art Music Sources." The talk - free and open to the public - is slated for 4:30 in Bibbins 223. Antokoletz's visit is co-sponsored by the divisions of musicology, strings and theory, and the dean of the Conservatory. When asked about his passion for the music of Béla Bartók, Antokoletz said, "My passion began when I heard his set of six string quartets at the Aspen Music Festival when I was a high school student in the late 1950s, and later when I performed them upon entering Juilliard as a violinist in the early 1960s. I was struck by the extraordinary excitement and depth of emotional and intellectual experience afforded by the composer's varied and complex musical expression. Antokoletz continued, "It was only gradually, however, that I came to realize, through systematic score analysis and scholarly research, that a coherent network of theoretical principles (based on the interaction and transformation between the diatonic folk modes and the more abstract symmetrical pitch formations as derived from the system of the interval cycles) provided the foundation for my intuitive response to the music. Through this research, I became aware of the multiplicity of musical sources underlying the divergent, yet unified musical structures of Bartók's repertory in general. "The 'uniquely' Bartókian qualities (or his signature) is manifested not by any single specific feature, but by the synthesis of a multiplicity of folk and art music sources into an original contemporary musical language and style. As part of the process of synthesis, Bartók himself referred to the principle of diatonic 'extension in range' of chromatic themes and the reverse, chromatic 'compression' of diatonic themes. This principle governs Bartók's organic shaping of the melodic and harmonic materials on all levels of the musical edifice. This generalized stylistic principle, in which the essence of the multiplicity of folk and art music sources is constantly present, might be considered Bartók's "signature." Antokoletz concluded, "In addition to the warmth and intensity of Bartók's expression stemming from the transformed features of German late-Romantic chromaticism and expressive dissonance, and the more fleeting mysterious moods that emerge from the static harmonies that he found in the French impressionist scores of Debussy, Bartók acquired the dynamic 'tempo giusto' dance rhythms and 'parlando rubato' rhythms that he found to be linked with the pentatonic/diatonic modalities of Eastern-European folk music as well as North-African Arab and Turkish folk music, all of which Bartók gradually infused by the mid-1920s with the counterpoint of Italian Baroque composers and J.S. Bach into a systematic network of nontraditional scales, intervallic-cells (that is, discrete melodic/harmonic pitch collections), and varied rhythmic schemata. The rapid unequal-beat dance rhythms of the Bulgarians, for instance, are especially striking as Bartók had used them in the fast movements of his String Quartets Nos. 4 and 5 (1928 and 1934).
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