Night music (Bartók)

Night music is a musical style of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók which he used mostly in slow movements of multi-movement ensemble or orchestra compositions in his mature period. It is characterized by "eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies."

As with many musical styles, it is not possible to make a satisfying let alone indisputable definition of Night music. Bartók did not say or explain much about this style, but he approved of the term and used it himself. Most of the works in Night music style do not carry a title. From an audience point of view "'Night Music' consists of those works or passages which convey to the listener the sounds of nature at night". This is quite subjective and self-referential. Mostly, subjective and far-fetched descriptions are available: "quiet, blurred cluster-chords and imitations of the twittering of birds and croaking of nocturnal creatures", "In an atmosphere of hushed expectancy, a tapestry is woven of the tiny sounds of nocturnal animals and insects." More concrete is "Eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies".

Instead of an attempt at defining, a list of characteristics of 'Night music' is more useful.

Night music developed stepwise and has unclear boundaries. Yet, a list of pieces of Night music can be established including its precursors. In some cases one could argue that only specific sections within a piece or movement are Night music. Danchenka's list (1987) of some works specifies in many entries exactly which bars are Night music. For instance, only the middle section of the Adagio religioso of the Piano Concerto No. 3 is included. However, Gillies (1993) points out how the main melodic material of the opening and closing sections are related to the bird calls of the middle section. As the bird calls could not be modified to match other melodic material, the opening and closing sections had to be directly derived from the bird calls.

As a modernist composer, Bartók did not compose music as the esthetic expression of human ethics, and as a reserved personality he shunned sentimentality, specifically breaking with Romantic nineteenth century music. While he largely based his music in faster tempo on the vitality of folk music, folk music did not provide him with many suitable idioms for slow movements (an exception is e.g. the "sirató" (elegy) middle section of the Piano Sonata (1926)). The development of Night music was influenced by sound effect compositions by Debussy and Ravel as well as pre-Bachian composers like Couperin. Schneider shows the influence of the Hungarian style of musical depictions of nature, night and the vast open space by the Hungarian composers Erkel, Mosonyi, Szendy, Weiner, and Dohnányi. Close family of Bartók agree that inspiration for Night music came from summer nights at Szőllőspuszta where Bartók visited his sister from 1921 onwards. This estate lies in Békés county in the Great Hungarian Plain, Nagy Alföld.

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Wikipedia