Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances

Today I'd like to take a few minutes picking apart a piece I've been working on, the Six Romanian Folk Dances (sz 56) by Béla Bartók. These were published first as a piano work in 1915, later orchestrated for a small ensemble. I've been putting them together off and on for the last few months and I've nearly got them committed to memory. Hopefully solid interpretation is just a few steps down the line from there. With any help this exercise in description and analysis will help me on my way to a better understanding of the piece, as well as most likely offend many Bartók scholars, and probably some Transylvanians.

To my best knowledge, and research on the piece yields very little until I can get to a good library, the six dances are actually fiddles tunes from Transylvania, transcribed by Bartók with original accompaniments.

The First Dance is titled JOC CU BÂTĂ, a stick dance described as energetic and merry. I hear it as something of a drinking song. If you can picture a bunch of Transylvanians' arms entwined, beer mugs in hand, apparently with a stick in the other, you have some idea of the character of the piece. It begins with a sort of stuttering, lurching rhythm and a melody that escalates in the halting manner that an inebriate might work his way toward the door until collapsing (a grace note of fifth landing on a staccato tonic chord in bar 4) mid-phrase and then making one more half-hearted attempt to start back up again before settling back, this time to the tonic major at the end of the first phrase. Now that brings to light the interesting aspect of this tune. Bartók has started the song firmly in the key of A minor, even going so far as to essentially outline the melodic minor scale, and he lands on a tonic chord mid phrase. And there is a V-I cadence, but it is actually in this case a v-I, the dominant being minor and the phrase seeming in theory to be a half cadence toward the key of D. And in fact the next phrase does begin harmonized by a D major chord, but immediately returns to A minor and its relative C major before landing again on that v-I cadence. This continues through the dance, phrases all seeming to live in the land of A minor, C naturals abounding, but every time without fail the phrase cadences on a Major triad. So rather than define a key in the major/minor sense, we are left with only a key center (A) around which the piece revolves in multiple modalities. This slippery sense of tonality will come up again.

The second dance is titled BRÂUL or "waistband dance," a title that certainly sounds like it could be something slightly inappropriate. In fact the dance somehow or other entails a cloth belt, which is what lends the song its title. It's a quick happy little thing in D minor, with no key signature, and it's the shortest dance of the six. Structurally on the page it forms sort of a mirror image of itself, the top and bottom lines being nearly same, and the middle two being likewise similar. It reminds me of a cartoon scene with some mischievous character or other sneaking around on tip-toe and pausing behind a tree before starting out again.

PE LOC is a stamping dance in which, and this is important to me, the participants do not move from a certain location. The description points out the small intervals of the melody, which indeed only spans a major sixth and stays in small, ornamented circular figures. And the stamping must be pretty light because the dynamic never gets above piano. It is described as similar to bagpipe music, and it certainly sounds very ethnic, perhaps more so than any of the others, but I hear it as a tune for some sort of rough-hewn wooden flute, like a shakuhachi. It is one of the six that actually has a representative key signature, B minor, although the harmony is certainly not "functional" by any means.

The fourth dance is one of my favorites. BUCIUMEANA is a hornpipe dance, nothing like the fiddler's hornpipes I am familiar with from celtic and bluegrass music. It's a haunting and expressive melody (for once I buy the editorial description) in triple meter, over an accompaniment that is frequently in duple meter, and reminiscent of tolling bells in the distant. Here we run into Bartók's slippery tonality again. The piece again hovers around a key center of A, but if one were to do a pitch catalog the result would almost undoubtedly be D harmonic minor. And yet, with the half-step distribution of that pitch aggregate Bartók is able to use the C# to imply only an A major triad, and the B-flat becomes the key defining half step, descending to the tonic instead of ascending. I think all this elegantly contributes to the sort of exotic and lonesome nature of the melody.

POARGA ROMÂNEASCĂ is a polka, and a children's dance. The grace note staccato figure of the melody makes this abundantly apparent, as does the boom-chick of the left hand. Structurally, the tune is essential the same melody repeated, transposed, and re-harmonized in four phrases. The theoretically D-oriented pitch collection of the previous dance makes clear sense in this dance, which also carries a representative key signature of D major. Thus the final tonic A major chord of the Buciumeana (importantly carrying a fermata) becomes a half-cadence resolved decisively and immediately at the start of this fifth dance. The final phrase is another half-cadence and transitions with no pause into the final dance.

MĂRUNŢEL is a fast and lively finish to the set. The dance apparently calls for small steps in movements, which must be out of necessity resulting from its fast tempo. In this dance we deal one final time with Bartók's shifting modality. The song begins firmly in D as proposed by the key signature following the half cadence at the end of the preceding dance. But after two measures it's clear we are really in D lydian, with a g-sharp playing a major role in the melody. The first section ends on what appears to be another half cadence. In a great moment of surprise and one of the most harmonically exhilarating spots in the set, we take off again, at a slightly faster tempo, with a new, albeit similar melody focusing around the key of C, or according to the key signature change, G. So what is it? Well, it looks and sounds like C lydian more than anything else. There are plenty of f-sharps, but also plenty of implied dominant relationships built around G and it is followed by a new phrase, presumably at the sub-dominant, with a preponderance of f-naturals, ending in a half-cadence on G. So back to the C melody you say, and Bartók gives it to us, BUT, this time he's harmonized it in A mixolydian. And when the second theme returns it's harmonized in C but cadences in A, and on it's repeat Bartók again (much as in Buciumeana) uses the half step between B-flat and A to firmly entrench the harmony in the key of A major before a jangling and energetic landing to end the piece.

The beauty of all this harmonic slipperyness to me is that, in the bigger picture the piece is almost unquestionably in the key center of A, with various excursions, never too far from home. I've been studying Schumann's Kinderscenen concurrently with the Bartók and I see the similarities between the two. The Schumann, though on a larger scale, begins and ends its journey in the key of G, with the tonal excursions right in the middle of the set and a somewhat delayed landing back at the tonic. We see it in the Bartók also. Leaving A in the second and third dances. And while the fourth dance sonically seems to fit back into the key of A, if can easily be considered (especially given its brevity) as a sort of set-up for the strong D Major of the fifth dance, which is sustained and bent through the first two thirds of the final dance before finally bringing us home to bright, splashy A Major.

I think these Bartók dances are endlessly hip in their harmonization and presentation. I have a strong affinity toward sets of miniatures, which is why I find myself so drawn to these as well as the Schumann. I really feel that the small scale of pieces says nothing of the magnitude of their content, which in this case is quite interesting and refreshing. The set has a clear sense of direction, fascinating contrast and makes a rich and satisfying journey out of relatively simple means. I'm a fan!

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Here's a link to Bartók himself playing them, and a link to the sheet music so you can follow along.