Bela Bartok (2)

Cover for Folk Music of Rumania
(after a photo by Bela Bartok)
30" x 20", oil on canvas, 2012

Hungarian girls in traditional dress
(after a photo by Bela Bartok)
32" x 25", oil on canvas, 2012

In the late eighties playing the countdown of 100 songs could take up to 24 hours. I had orchestral symphonies in the list that I would play whole. Bela Bartok was a Top 100 regular those days. There are no symphonies in the Top 100 2011. That is not to say I don't like classical music anymore, there is still, and always has been, classical music in my list. These days I divide up the lengthy works into their passages, movements, acts, or selected arias. I'm also drawn to classical works that don't rely on long orchestral movements (such as my infatuation with medieval music). Playing the 100 songs this year takes up a modest six hours.

I always liked the music of Bela Bartok but his presence in my top 100s have been limited to his function as a ethnomusicologist who extensively recorded in the field in Eastern Europe. And as a photographer! With four of his photographs used to model my paintings after, he is this year's most used visual source. The four photographs are equally divided between Romania and his native Hungary. It is quite possible that Bartok took the photograph of the six Romanian boys on Palm Sunday (which will be coming up soon).

The last two canvases of the Top 100 2011 on top a back yard landscape are paintings to illustrate second tracks from both Folk Music of Rumania and Hungarian Folk Music. The Romanian song is called Lament for a dead brother and resides at precisely the other end of the spectrum as the first one, which was a lively and fast Hora dance performed by village (gypsy) musicians (see Rumania, July 2011).  The lament from the Romanian LP was recorded by Bartok. The Hungarian song Elmegyek, elmegyek was not recorded by him but comes from the official academic Hungarian research title mentioned above. The Hungarian image comes from the booklet inside Bartok's Folk Music of Hungary LP.

Romania

Cover for Folk Music of Rumania
(from a photograph by Bela Bartok)
20" x 16"
oil on canvas, 2011

Same record, same size canvas, and as with the previous blog earlier today painted from a photograph by Bela Bartok. The painting represents again a field recording made in Romania. Whereas the previous one dealt with a lively dance music style called Hora, the style here is called  a Bocet, not so lively it's in fact the opposite, it's a lament for the dead. In Romania, as in many other countries/cultures, part of funerary rites contain the hiring of a professional mourning singer. I have mentioned, but not yet dwelt on in these pages, my obsession with cry-singing, or keening or wailing. I collect recordings of such practices and every year I find one or two new ones and write about it in my commentaries. The commentary always involves this one story, allow me to quote from my book Top 100 2009:

    About fifteen years ago I heard in a museum exhibit a sound recording of a banshee. At least I thought I did but as it turns out there is no such thing as a sound recordings of a Banshee. A banshee is a spirit who appears in the form of a woman, the spirit of death in Irish lore. Whatever it was I heard I don’t know but it was the most beautiful and haunting recording of a female voice I had ever listened to. I swear it was at the Columbus Museum of Art but upon inquiry they didn’t know what I was talking about. But I did hear it for real, I’m not crazy. It has become a quest to find it, the Holy Grail, a song so beautiful it would render all others meaningless. Irish friends well versed in Irish lore could not lead me to it, scientific research through OSU’s music cognition program did lead me somewhere but not to the banshee. Many things I found on this quest; through keyword searches such as keening, wailing, mourning, and of course banshee, I have come across many voices of women weep-singing, a tradition that is forever linked with the wake of a deceased especially a child. The wake for a dead infant is a rite found in many parts of the globe (The Cossacks of the Caucasus in Russia, in the rain forests of Papua New Guinea, in Mediterranean Spain, Hungary, Latin America, Ireland, etc.) Especially the wakes in Christian countries are festive rituals, including music and dance to celebrate the child becoming an angel. Sound recordings of these are sparse but this year another two were added to my modest collection.  
I am pleased to welcome the eleventh geographic example of weep-singing to my collection. 
(If anyone has only the slightest idea of what I heard, that fateful afternoon in the museum, let me know. I will follow any and every lead.)