Bartók

Performance at the city hall chamber last night. Two violins, one mezzo. Plus a narrator. Who spoke Hungarian in machine-gun paragraphs. At one point I decided to count the number of phrases she was using in each sentence.. something like twelve. I could tell because her voice would rise at the end of each phrase, she would catch a little breath and then dive back in. Acoustics were not suitable for rapid-fire speech, so much of what she said was just a blur to me, but I did understand that at least part of the audio that was going to be played out of the laptop that the violinists had brought a long derived from a radio program out of Kolozsvár (Cluj), a major Transylvanian city off to the east of Debrecen. They were tinny and scratchy, but authentic enough, and it gave you a sense of what the real music was, like listening to the recordings of Appalachian songs on archival records. Either that, or the mezzo sang a few verses of the particular song.

Hungarian music is just—different. I looked up on Wikipedia to see what there was to be found, which was primarily that Bartok and Kodály had determined that the typical Hungarian folk song uses a pentatonic scale and that notes are almost always the same length. Well, I am not sure of the pentatonicity of these songs, they sounded like mixolydian mode to me, with maybe a couple of extra half tones thrown in for amusement. I kept saying to myself, but there is no MELODY there. And yet the mezzo always seemed to know exactly what she was doing, her voice seemed every once in a while to hit on a key note that somehow resounded like a trombone blast. As she sang, he body would dip and sway a bit, and I could see how the Sitz im Leben of the songs was a public sing-dance event, probably with lead singer in the center of a circle of village girls dancing around her in a circle and joining her on alternating verses.