I mentioned Bartok in the post about Arthur Herman. How did he swim back into my ken? A combination of reasons that leads intermediately to this. I can explain.
The only contemporary classical composer I admire in recent years has been Philip Glass. I’ve written about him several times and featured him in this post at Instapunk Returns: The Hours Are Upon Me. Why I was not happy to hear that he had responded to the change in leadership at the Lincoln Center by withdrawing the debut of his “Lincoln Symphony” from that organization’s performance schedule.
Initially I was annoyed, and then as I thought about it suspicious. The annoyance phase decided me to write an IPR post about the hold the elites have always had on arts involving considerable expense. The Medici’s paid for a lot of masterpieces that wouldn’t have seen the light of day without their cash up front. Glass is 87 now, and has inevitably spent a lot of time with the cultural autocrats who have created a Lincoln Center program strategy not many people have attended in recent years. You know, the usual. Art by their sponsored niche victims for our own good, whether w like it or not.
I think I’m going to do that post, along with my suspicion that Glass is secretly pleased not to release the Lincoln Symphony. Very possibly, it’s not very good because what it’s purported to be simply isn’t plausible.
What does this have to do with Bartok. Thinking about Glass I was reminded of a discovery I made about the state of classical music in the U.S. a few years ago. I had occasion to research a Pulitzer category I hadn’t even known existed. Here’s what I found buried in my Notes:
The Pulitzer Prize for Music has been awarded annually since 1943, recognizing a distinguished musical composition by an American that had its first performance or recording in the U.S. during the year.
Here are some of the notable winners since 1943:
- 1943: William Schuman, Secular Cantata No. 2: A Free Song
- 1944: Howard Hanson, Symphony No. 4, Requiem
- 1945: Aaron Copland, Appalachian Spring, ballet
- 1946: Leo Sowerby, The Canticle of the Sun
- 1947: Charles Ives, Symphony No. 1
- 1948: Walter Piston, Symphony No. 1
- 1949: Virgil Thomson, Louisiana Story, film score
- 1950: Gian Carlo Menotti, Amahl and the Night Visitors
- 1955: Gian Carlo Menotti, The Medium
- 1983: Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
- 1991: Shulamit Ran, Symphony
- 1997: Wynton Marsalis, Blood on the Fields
- 1998: George Gershwin
- 1999: Duke Ellington
- 2007: Ornette Coleman, Sound Grammar
- 2010: Jennifer Higdon, Violin Concerto
- 2013: Caroline Shaw, Partita for 8 Voices
- 2015: Julia Wolfe, Anthracite Symphony
- 2017: Du Yun, The Silk Road
- 2019: Ellen Reid, The River of War
- 2021: Tania León, Yo y La Gente
- 2023: Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, Omar
- 2024: Susie Ibarra, The Great American Dream>>
- 2025: Susie Ibarra
Looks like there was a sea change in 2010. No Pulitzer for Glass. (Maybe the Lincoln Symphony was supposed to be the consolation prize. Like giving an Oscar to an old actor who’d never gotten one in a long and otherwise praiseworthy career.) I did make a point of finding recordings by the recent Pulitzer winners at YouTube. I, um, did not like them. I, um, found them a joke. An opera with no staging, no story, just a half dozen a capella singers singing notes without melody. That kind of thing. In the music that was played on instruments I could hear dissonant echoes of Schoenberg and the other revolutionary modernist I knew of, Bela Bartok. Of course my knowledge of them was hardly determinative of anything, because I didn’t like them and hadn’t listened much.
I’d had brushes with the modernist view a couple times previously. When I was in college I took some piano lessons at $5/hr from another student named Ludwig something. Can’t remember, though I recall his friendly but brooding earnestness. He put me through drills with my back turned to the piano, playing two keys one after the other and asked me if they were one or two notes apart. After enough of this to suit him, he announced that I had ‘near-perfect’ pitch, which was supposed to please me but did not. He said if I practiced enough, I could become an excellent piano player. I practiced for a time but five dollars was a lot of scratch to me in those days and it seemed like a long slow process to get to be not good for much. there was plenty of musical talent in my family, but my Dad had artistic talent for drawing and painting I didn’t inherit, so I was philosophical about have been skipped over in the music department too. I quit the piano. My Chief memory of Ludwig was when I asked him about his own ambitions he wanted to be a composer. When I inquired about his favorite composer, he told me Bartok. That’s when I gave the guy a listen. I thought, if that’s perfect pitch, I’ll pass.
My next brush with the modernist musician mentality was at Borders Books, where during my below-the-radar poverty stretch in Greenwich I’d been a clerk in the music department for a year and a half around the time of 9/11. The department supervisor was an affable guy who’d been a music major at Ithaca College, a place I knew from my Cornell years. His studies had been primarily in composition, and he had two bête-noirs he repeatedly made dismissive jokes about: Mozart’s over-reliance on “ninths” and the whole farce called Grand Opera. He hated opera and seemingly despised Amadeus. I bit my tongue for many months and then one day I’d suddenly had enough and scorched him. I don’t know what set me off. He had a way of going on and in about the fakeness of the whole singing from the face or the mask or whatever it was, and thought he was being overbearingly pompous for a composer who hadn’t composed anything. Maybe it was the old black guys who came in as a small group when they’d discovered we had a computer database of thousands of records, as well as notations of ones we had or could get. They were serious old-time jazz fanciers, and on slow nights they’d hang around and pick CDs for me to listen to, explaining what I was hearing and why it was so great. How I learned about Coltrane and Miles Davis. I already had Bill Evans, a recommendation by a helpful music clerk back in Dayton, and the old guys approved of him too but repeated the warning that clerk had given me: “Don’t listen to him for too long at a time… that can be bad for you.”
They taught me. It occurred to me that a man who had studied composition could have taught me about something other than “ninths” and pretentious operatic “masks”.
Anyhow. I had veered away from the modern classical music genre because it seemed they were like the other high arts in the last half of the 20th century, fakers who had absorbed one lesson from the last pioneers to break through the barriers to pure abstraction, the lesson being that no one will know the difference between real inspiration and cunning imitation. Which is the surest way to kill an art form. Why painting, poetry, and music had all blown their own brains out for half a century without anyone’s noticing.
Where my wife enters the story. For a couple years now, she has battled lapses in memory by finding specific areas of focus that interest her strongly enough to keep after them. One, of course, is the dogs and cats that served to replace thev horses she could no longer own year ago. But more recently, she has acquired a keen interest in revisiting her academic roots in things Russian and Eastern European. She reads Izvestia/TASS every day, not in Russian but with quotable memories in Russian, and from what she shares, their take on the news is actually somewhat more truthful and objective than the BBC or our own alphabet news monolith of Trump hatred. Sometimes their predictions and factual references are proven more right than any made here. Sad. But that’s probably how she identified Orban as a man of stature and then the whole nation of Hungary.
She spends a big part of every day following developments in Hungary and learning more about the country and its astonishing architectural legacy. She’s more interested in that than my stuff, and I don’t blame her. She gets enough of my opinions from me without having to read them in tiny print on her phone. I started a Hungary site with good intentions…
I posted a few placeholder-type entries and failed to do my own scouting for photos and other material when I realized she wasn’t linking them on her FB page as a point of departure. My misunderstanding of what Hungary tracking and promotion would require.
The coin that dropped in the Lincoln Center/Philip Glass contretemps was that the Pulitzer list I rediscovered put me in mind of Bartok as one of the suspects in the death of classical music.The first name on the list of revolutionary prize winners in 2010 was Jennifer Higdon, who won for a violin concerto but was probably more praised for her Concerto for Orchestra.
Bartok’s masterpiece? Yes, he too had a Concerto for Orchestra. He was also born in Hungary. (Hmmm. Me, scratching my head). I found live performances of both on YouTube and played them this morning. Yes, I know I have no right to critique either of these pieces. I did once learn how to read music, but not using it I forgot it. But I have every dilettante’s CYA: “I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.”
What was I listening for? Armed with his new identity as a Hungarian, Bartok inspired me to dig a little deeper into his history and expressed musical philosophy. He left Hungary in protest of Nazi sympathizers in his homeland and their support for persecution of the Jews. This was in 1932. He came here as a refugee, leaving behind considerable fame in his birth country to start all over in New York. Musically, he had deep roots in the folk songs of Eastern Europe, which he kept in his musical compositions even as he explored the new tonal scale employed by Schoenberg and others. In other words, he was striving to be a bridge between the old and the new, reinforcing both. I could imagine him as a kind of Picasso or Matisse (or Joyce and Eliot), pushing a new esthetic to its limits — and inadvertently spawning generations of sly imitators creating throwaway product.
So I was listening in Bartok for signs of the folk music roots the biographers insisted were there. In Higdon I was listening for a pioneering voice unique to her own appropriation of a Bartok form.
Here are the two concertos:
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