5.6 General spirit (connected to folk music

In the first half of the twentieth century it was a quite common tendency: the tritone would more and more take over the use of the fifth as a harmonic basis. The overly familiar cadential connections V-I or IV – II6 – V – I were more and more avoided whenever possible. Also, the tritone had a pleasantly floating sound because of its complex frequency ratio (of at least 7:5). In the music of Messiaen this interval is used almost obsessively and it is also prominently present in the octatonic and the whole-tone mode.

5.6 GENERAL SPIRIT (CONNECTED WITH FOLK MUSIC) In order to understand Bartók’s statements about folk music, we should comprehend the importance of that music in his view of aesthetics. He refers to the word ‘spirit’ as the most essential element of his aesthetic. According to Bartók, a work of art was partly a communal spirit - the spirit of folk music and partly the inner urge of the artist to express his emotions. Spirit was something beyond the material of music; it expressed the totality of lived experience. This dual meaning raises a question: if the artwork expresses the spirit of folk music (the reality), how could it at the same time express the personal feelings of the artist (being the truthfulness of the artist)? For Bartók answering this question is the essence of life, it is the synthesis of reality itself, being folk music, and their discovery by living and experiencing.

That is why he states: “It is quite possible that in the future, peasant music will have to play a far more important part than it does today.”105 This prediction apparently did not come true. From my perspective, Bartók was one of the last composers for whom this influence was of crucial importance. The ‘pure, fresh, and healthy’ world of folk music in the musics of Grieg, Dvorák, Mussorgsky, Mahler, and Janáček seemed to vanish, to be replaced by the pop song. However recently, I learned, that my perspective was too limited. In the Netherlands, where I live, the reach of folk music has always been small; in Germany, mostly for political reasons, folk music lost its prominent place and is largely replaced by Pop and Schlager. However, former composition students of mine informed me about the vitality of folk music in Norway, the Baltics, Greece, Spain and Switzerland, and what a great source of inspiration it is to them.

105Bartók, 'The relation between folk music to the development of the art music of our time'.In: Essays (1976), p. 330.