I've REALLY, REALLY tried, but ......

[LMcD]

There are certain works with which, despite repeated efforts over time, I continue to struggle. This week I thought I'd try - yet again - to get to grips with Bartok's string quartets, which are featuring in the Lunchtime Concerts, but I don't think the light bulb is going to be switched on. I don't have a problem with Bartok, or with string quartets, generally. I would be interested in learning of other people's heroic but doomed efforts to develop an understanding, or at least a liking, of particular musical works. Tips on how to approach the Bartok quartets will be given due consideration

[kernelbogey]

There are certain works with which, despite repeated efforts over time, I continue to struggle. This week I thought I'd try - yet again - to get to grips with Bartok's string quartets, which are featuring in the Lunchtime Concerts, but I don't think the light bulb is going to be switched on. I don't have a problem with Bartok, or with string quartets, generally. I would be interested in learning of other people's heroic but doomed efforts to develop an understanding, or at least a liking, of particular musical works. Tips on how to approach the Bartok quartets will be given due consideration

I add my post, from another thread, as I think it relevant to the OP.

Interestingly (to me ) I was put off Copland largely by repeats of rodeo and some other Copland war-horses and told a friend that try as I might I can't get into Copland. Then I heard his charming story about the titling of Appalachian Spring: somehow this turned a switch somewhere inside and I've been able to hear his music anew (though more work needed ).

The story is that while working on the music, he always referred to it as 'New Martha Graham Ballet'. He only learned the Appalachian Spring name (IIRC) once the music was completed. He preceded this bit of the story with anecodtes of fans saying, 'Mr Copland, when I hear this piece I can positively smell the Appalachian woods in springtime'....

Re the Bartok Quartets, I missed yesterday's programme, but hope to hear today's and tomorrow's.

Not long after my brother, then at University, had introduced me to classical music by buying me an LP of two Rossini overtures for my - I think - fourteenth birthday, he began to buy other LPs mainly for himself, but I listened to them all. I must have been 15-16 when he bought the Bartok 5th and 6th quartets. To me this sound-world was nothing like the worlds of Mozart, Haydn, Brahms and so forth that I was beginning to get to know. Yet something of the fifth quartet in particular grew on me and spoke to me directly - even at that tender and musically inexperienced age. I haven't heard either of them in decades. But perhaps a naive, 'innocent ear' approach might work? Good luck!

[visualnickmos]

But perhaps a naive, 'innocent ear' approach might work? Good luck!

That's a very good approach. Maybe just pick a single movement at random, from any of the quartets, and listen to it as a musical 'experience'....

and repeat the exercise, and eventually you may decide to listen to one of the quartets in its entirety.

I hope you DO find your hoped-for appreciation of Bartok's SQs. Let us know your progress....

[cloughie]

That's a very good approach. Maybe just pick a single movement at random, from any of the quartets, and listen to it as a musical 'experience'....

and repeat the exercise, and eventually you may decide to listen to one of the quartets in its entirety.

I hope you DO find your hoped-for appreciation of Bartok's SQs. Let us know your progress....

A ‘focused’ bleeding chunk?

[kernelbogey]

This week's series seems to go only as far as SQ4...?

[visualnickmos]

A ‘focused’ bleeding chunk?

I suppose one could put it like that!

[Quarky]

There are certain works with which, despite repeated efforts over time, I continue to struggle. This week I thought I'd try - yet again - to get to grips with Bartok's string quartets, which are featuring in the Lunchtime Concerts, but I don't think the light bulb is going to be switched on. I don't have a problem with Bartok, or with string quartets, generally. I would be interested in learning of other people's heroic but doomed efforts to develop an understanding, or at least a liking, of particular musical works. Tips on how to approach the Bartok quartets will be given due consideration

Try Beethoven late quartets + folksy influences/ rhythms? That worked for me as a young man, and I didn't have a problem with his quartets. I was strongly into Jazz at the time, which helped to open the mind.

[Pulcinella]

My situation (I hesitate to call it a problem!) is quite the reverse: I got to know and like the Bartok set in the sixth form (those wonderful Saga LPs) but the late Beethoven leave me absolutely cold! (Actually not just the late Beethoven, but they were suggested as the way in!)

[Bryn]

. . . those wonderful Saga LPs . . .

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B000CSUMV2

[LMcD]

Try Beethoven late quartets + folksy influences/ rhythms? That worked for me as a young man, and I didn't have a problem with his quartets. I was strongly into Jazz at the time, which helped to open the mind.

I find the late Beethoven quartets difficult and challenging BUT I've never yet failed to listen all the way through, and I will listen to them again because I want to, and believe I will, understand more each time and thus derive more enjoyment from listening to them. I find the Bartok quartets rather forbidding, and, despite my best efforts, I derive no pleasure whatever from listening to then and my mind wanders after a while.

[Pulcinella]

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B000CSUMV2

Hope that's a hint to LMcD: already part of my collection.

[Pulcinella]

I find the late Beethoven quartets difficult and challenging BUT I've never yet failed to listen all the way through, and I will listen to them again because I want to, and believe I will, understand more each time and thus derive more enjoyment from listening to them. I find the Bartok quartets rather forbidding, and, despite my best efforts, I derive no pleasure whatever from listening to then and my mind wanders after a while.

If you are prepared to investigate further, this little monograph by Matyas Seiber might give some pointers:

https://www.boosey.com/shop/prod/Seiber-Matyas-String-Quartets-Of-Bela-Bartok/638149

I had it as a separate publication, but gave it away to a friend when I discovered it was reprinted in the full study score set.

(I now fully expect you to turn the tables on me and get me to do some homework on the late Beethoven! )

PS: Cheaper from Presto, and here's the full set study score too:

https://www.prestomusic.com/sheet-music/search?search_query=Bartok+string+quartets

[Bryn]

Hope that's a hint to LMcD: already part of my collection.

Perhaps starting with the bonus re. the 1st Quartet might help.

[Serial_Apologist]

If you are prepared to investigate further, this little monograph by Matyas Seiber might give some pointers:

https://www.boosey.com/shop/prod/Seiber-Matyas-String-Quartets-Of-Bela-Bartok/638149

I had it as a separate publication, but gave it away to a friend when I discovered it was reprinted in the full study score set.

Seiber - a wonderful composer in his own right who came to this country just prior to WW2 as a refugee and taught a number of fine British composers - was a pupil to Bartók's colleague and friend Zoltán Kodáy. I understand that in that little volume of the Bartók SQs, which I have not read, he recommends listening to each quartet four times before moving on to the next in the chronological order in whcih they were composed. As one who has long familiarised himself with most "modern" compositional languages this would seem a big ask, especially as growing into the quartets formed part of my self-education in modern music in the round from about the age of 13, helped in those good old days by Radio 3!!! I would however recommend starting with No 1, composed in 1908 in a harmonic and formal language that was advanced for its time but still audibly derived from precedents, offering routes either into the subsequent Bartók quartets, or those of Schoenberg, starting with the first two - the second of which takes much of the post-Wagnerian language of the Bartók, pushing it over the frontier into atonality - and thence into Berg and Webern. All these quartets made use of received conventions including elements of sonata and variation form and counterpoint, including fugue in Bartók 1. Jumping forward to the second Bartók quartet, composed 9 years after the first, the advanced yearning chromaticism of the first has been subsumed within a leaner, freer harmonic and contrapuntal vocabulary, in which mix influences from French Impressionism in the harmonies and Eastern European and Near Eastern folk idioms in terms of rhythms, melodic contours and scales have been interwoven. Gone is the emotional atmosphere of No 1, replaced by a dry sense approaching irony, arguably closer to Mahler in rapid inter-juxtapositional referencings, which can go from the near-abstract or near-atonal to the commonplace in a jiffy in the faster movements. Narrative intelligibility rests in the working out of basic musical melodic and motivic shapes, so we're still talking Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven here; and single linear threads are clearly presented to signpost one through the journey, hleped by the fact that in any one leading line there remains some sense of tonal anchorage which, notwithstanding the dissonance by conventional standards of the sorrounding thematic and harmonic processes of working out, has all but gone in the music of Schoenberg and Webern by this stage (1917). T

This second quartet pretty well establishes the language that prevails in all the remaining quartets, although in Nos 3 and 4, in particular, the working out has become subject to more extreme compressions and condensation. No 5 represents the biggest expansion of the means developed in 3 and 4, along with advances in instrumental technique and timbral possibilities one can find outlined in any good liner notes, and No 6 something of a look back via a résumé of all the foregoing advances in the light of homesickness, despair at the prospect of war, and failing health.

Another way to go through the quartets, if you have time and availability of recordings, is to infill by playing the intervening works, such as the opera Bluebeard's Castle, The Miraculous Mandarin ballet music, the Dance Suite of 1923, the two violin and piano sonatas of the year before, the Music for Strings, Harp, Celesta and Percussion of 1936, the numerous folk settings from straightforward to wonderfully complex and penetrating, such as the Improvisations on Peasant Songs of 1920 - the latter of which brings me to the magnificent piano output, starting with the amazing Bagatelles of 1908, some of which are as harmonically advanced as the contemporaneous Schoenberg Op 11: Bartók was a virtuoso pianist, and his oeuvre is as representive and as revealing of his creative intelligence as a composer as the string quartets, with which they can profitably be compared in examining differences and commonalities in approach etc.

There's probably much more I could add and bore you with, but I hope this helps in your quest.

[Tapiola]

Coincidentally, my undergraduate dissertation, written in my callow youth, was a comparative structural and compositional analysis of the Bartok and late Beethoven quartets. My external examiner opened my viva voce exam with the comment that he had read my thesis "with great interest" and then proceeded to ask me numerous questions on Stravinsky! I was awarded a mark I was well pleased with, and after the degree results were posted, the external admitted to me that he had not read a single word of my work...

EDIT: However, my first exposure to Bartok's quartets (the start of the opening movement of the 4th), at the age of 15 and during a school music lesson, made me burst out laughing in disbelief!