David E. Schneider
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520245037
- eISBN:
- 9780520932050
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520245037.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This chapter focuses on “The Night's Music”, the fourth movement in Béla Bartók's December 1926 piano recital. It suggests that the acceptance of this work even among the conservative Hungarian ...
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This chapter focuses on “The Night's Music”, the fourth movement in Béla Bartók's December 1926 piano recital. It suggests that the acceptance of this work even among the conservative Hungarian audiences of Bartók's day is perhaps surprising for a work that would come to be seen as the locus classicus of a uniquely Bartókian contribution to the language of musical modernism. It explains that Bartók used a highly dissonant but very soft tone cluster made up of five adjacent semitones as a static background throughout most of the work.Less
This chapter focuses on “The Night's Music”, the fourth movement in Béla Bartók's December 1926 piano recital. It suggests that the acceptance of this work even among the conservative Hungarian audiences of Bartók's day is perhaps surprising for a work that would come to be seen as the locus classicus of a uniquely Bartókian contribution to the language of musical modernism. It explains that Bartók used a highly dissonant but very soft tone cluster made up of five adjacent semitones as a static background throughout most of the work.
