Composers › Béla Bartók › Programme note
Out of Doors (c1925)
Gerald Larner wrote 2 versions of differing length — choose one below.
With Drums and Pipes
Barcarolla
Musettes
The Night’s Music
The Chase
One of the basic item in Bartók’s mature style, together with East-European folksong and progressive West-European music, is outdoor sound. While Out of Doors is allied to some extent to the neo-classical movement of the 1920s, particularly in the polyphonic writing, it is above all Bartók’s tribute to the Hungarian countryside. In Drum and Pipes, for example, it becomes clear that his percussive chord clusters developed (like those of Charles Ives) from a translation of the drums of an outdoor band into piano terms. The pipes are represented by the legato passage which, in the middle of the piece, makes a timely contrast to percussive aggression.
If the title of Barcarolla suggests a Venetian setting, the music itself, with its metrical contradictions of the rocking rhythms that open the piece and its quietly persistent off-beat frog or bird, is more suggestive of a Transylvanian nocturne. Musettes alludes not so much to the eighteenth-century court dance as to bagpipes, a folk instrument which Bartók was particularly fond of imitating. The drones and wheezes are vividly reproduced on the piano and actually occupy much more of the piece than the lightly scored dances measures in the middle. The Night’s Music, the longest and most atmospheric piece in the set, is an early indication of Bartók’s acute sensitivity to the sounds of the night. Originally, it was to have been called “Concert of the Night” – a useful title which covers the contributions from nature itself in the first section, the ghost of a chorale in the middle section, and then the distant warbling of a shepherd’s pipe. The Chase is contrastingly violent, heavily percussive, naturally impetuous, even vertiginous, and obsessively based on an unrelenting left-hand ostinato.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Out of Doors/w290/n* .rtf”
With Drums and Pipes
Barcarolla
Musettes
The Night’s Music
The Chase
Through Out of Doors it is possible to trace much of his later and more ambitious music to its countryside origin. Other influences are at work on these five pieces of course. Not even Bartók was unaffected by the neo-classical movement of the 1920s, and in 1926 - when he wrote the Piano Sonata and the First Piano Concerto as well as Out of Doors - he was working on the keyboard music of the pre-Bach period. The neo-classical element is certainly there (particular in the polyphonic writing_ but it is neither as easily detectable no as fundamental as the out-of-doors element.In Drum and Pipes, for example, it becomes clear that Bartók’s percussive chord clusters, like those of charles Ives, developed from a translation of the drums of an outdoor band into piano terms. The contrasting legato passage in the middle of the piece no doubt represents the pipes, which undergo a further transformation in the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. The rhythmic interest of With Drums and Pipes, intensified in the third section by changing metres and the accelerating tempo, is a product of Bartók’s highly developed rhythmic imagination. But in this respect, too, he was encourage by the rhythmic freedom of Hungarian folksong. This is how he is able to make something exclusively Hungarian out of a conventional form in the Barcarolla. It begins imply enough in the 6/8 of the Venetian gondola song, rocking up and down in even groups of three quavers each. But, which the quaver movement persists in one hand or the other, the up-and-down groups are asymmetrically stretched or contracted with bar-by-bar changes of metre.
The title of the next piece Musettes is a reference not so much to the eighteenth-century court dance as to bagpipes (a folk instrument which Bartók was particularly fond of imitating: there is a devastating example in the 44 Violin Duos). The drones and wheezes are vividly reproduced on the piano and actually occupy much more of the piece than the lightly scored dances measures in the middle. The Night’s Music is also highly coloured. It is the longest and most atmospheric piece in the set and one of the earliest of Bartók’s several eerie and very individual nocturnes. Originally, it was to have been called Concert of the Night - a useful title which covers the contributions from nature itself in the first section (the persistent, rustling tone clusters overlaid by calls of birds or insects), the ghost of a folk song in the middle section, and then the distant warbling of a shepherd’s pipe. The Chase is contrastingly violent, heavily percussive, naturally impetuous, and obsessively based on an unrelenting left-hand ostinato
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Out of Doors 26/2/78”