When I was still a teenager,
a friend sat me down at a record
store and said in a secretive, almost conspiratorial voice,
"Listen to this."
Was I going to have a glimpse into
an exotic and unknown world, or hear plans for the coming
revolution? The answer was a resounding
yes. Four angry voices
jumped out at me from the record player with urgent repeated notes,
then stopped. Started again. Stopped another time,
as if there was too much emotion to allow
for a complete thought. Then the voices burst out in quarrelsome conversation,
permeated by
eerie, slithering sounds only to be silenced by those
angry repeated notes briefly appearing once again like a
still-to-be deciphered secret code.
As it turned out, I was listening to the beginning of Bela Bartok's Fifth String quartet
for the very first time. I did not fully grasp
what I was hearing. And yet, I was overwhelmed.
The power of Bartok's musical language,
full of complex rhythms, clashing harmonies,
and alluring folk-like dances was new to me,
yet hypnotic. Bartok ingeniously employed
uncommon sounds for effect, such as garish
glissandos and plucked strings slapping angrily against the fingerboard.
All this despite the fact that he had never played a string instrument himself.
Then came Bartok's so-called "night
music", in which I was transported into a melancholy
and spooky world of bits and pieces of sound
that literally gave me goosebumps. They could have been the sounds of an
idealized imaginary jungle, or the whisperings from the farthest reaches of
outer space. As the quartet's five movements went by,
I heard rousing music that you could almost dance to;
strange and exotic drone-like passages;
unearthly chorales;
and snare drum-like repeated notes that made me think
of a macabre funeral procession. When the work
finally hurdled towards its end, those angry repeated notes from the quartet's
opening reappeared for one last time and then,
suddenly, out of the blue, a simple child's
tune appeared, played with indifference, the accompaniment played
mechanically. To make this weird parody complete,
the melody was repeated in what had to sound like the wrong
key. "Enough nonsense," Bartok must have said to himself.
Or was it utter despair that he was feeling?
And then the work gathered confidence and roared to a rousing end.
It was an unknown and exotic world.
It was a revolution of a musical kind
that I had just experienced.
And Bartok had done it all by using only four instruments.
A string quartet.