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Bela Bartok's Sixth String Quartet

 

            Bela Bartok was born in Hungary in 1881. Throughout his childhood and late teenage years, he was very sickly1, almost having to drop out of the Budapest Academy of Music to regain his health. While at the Academy, Bartok grew interested in Hungarian folk music and developed a friendship with Zoltan Kodaly, also an advocate of Hungarian research. These two men journeyed the countryside together in search of folksongs and were extremely successful in finding them. Bartok's First String Quartet is a prime example of the use of folk elements in music. A range of 31 years exists between the first and last quartet, the last, or Sixth Quartet, having been written in 19392. .
             Bartok's increasing maturity and experience as a composer are apparent chronologically through his six quartets, with the Sixth Quartet being the culmination of not only motives used in other quartets, but also this new motive or theme used by many previous great composers: mesto. Some could argue that mesto means, "sad" no doubt, but in this case, the meaning is more than a tempo marking; it is a performance marking. Every movement of the Sixth Quartet starts with this idea of Mesto, each transposed from the other with little to no changes in rhythm or intervallic structure. What is it that makes this idea of Mesto so intriguing? What is the basis of the underlying structure of the Mesto and the rest of the music from the Sixth String Quartet? Bartok's use of the (0,2) and (0,7) dyads play an integral role in finding out.
             Every composer has a unique writing style. For example, some composers might only write for a specific instrument, and others might use a specific pattern of orchestration from piece to piece. Bartok's music is characterized by his specific use of intervals3. Within the Sixth String Quartet, the (0,2) dyad and the (0,7) dyad-the Major 2nd and Perfect 5th, respectively-are two prominent components that establish the structure of the quartet4.


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