The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Time and Clocks! Every piece of music this week deals with time or timepieces in an interesting way. None of us can escape the existential dilemma to which time subjects us and dealing with that can motivate humor or deep contemplation. This week we will experience a mix of both and plenty that is in between. If you think about it, music is constantly governed by time. It necessarily exists in time and is always regulated by a meter which musicians often describe as simply the music’s “time”. But beyond these obvious artifacts of its nature, many musicians have used the medium to explore and illustrate time in other ways.
Day 3 – Hary Janos by Zoltán Kodály
Do you have any friends who are prone to…exaggeration?
Zoltán Kodály was one of those music renaissancers, active in lots of different realms and leaving his mark on all of them. He is close enough to us historically that his influence has not been distilled into brief strokes regarding one particular discipline, and because of that we are able to sense his importance through the diversity of his contributions. As a Westerner today, I would say we tend to feel his impact on music education most prominently, but his manner of developing the Kodály Method also reflects his interests in both musicology and composition. When Kodály was inspired to improve music education in Hungary, he drew from a wide variety of influences from throughout his travels and life experiences, condensing them into the method we know today and also composing many of the exercises. Marks of Kodály’s influence on music education in the West include movable “do” solfege (solmization in which the syllables correspond to scale degrees as opposed to keys on the piano as they tend to in more French-inspired solfege methods), reading rhythms with different syllables (I often hear my violin students who have experience in public schools read rhythms as “ta ta ti-ti ti-ti” and it’s pretty effective), and a general pairing of gesture and movement with all educational topics.
In assembling his music education method Kodály drew from diverse influences that he found in various places. For example, his solfege method is British. His manner of movement is modeled largely after that of Swiss music educator Dalcroze. Kodály included sight singing examples from all eras of Western music history and also, very importantly, encouraged educators to adapt and alter the method to reflect and build on the tendencies of their local folk music traditions. All of these qualities of his method seem to flow from another area of interest and influence: musicology and ethnomusicology. Perhaps you could say the distinction between those two terms is somewhat artificial and based on a cultural myopia. But they do have discrete meanings in the contemporary academy. Kodály is usually more closely with associated with the field of ethnomusicology, kind of an emerging study during his lifetime. And so is his co-national contemporary Béla Bartók. It’s fascinating that the two most significant Hungarian composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both happened to be avid collectors and dissectors of folk music, but there you have it. Coincidences abound in this mysterious and wonderful world of ours. Both Kodály and Bartók have influenced the study, knowledge and practice of ethnomusicology in our day and, while Bartok has emerged as the more significant compositional force of the two, there is no doubt that both of their creative outputs were affected by this interest. Also, they liked to hang out at the beach together and show off their ripped muscles…
What? You don’t believe that photo is authentic? Well, maybe I need to do a bit more investigating. Sometimes I don’t dig deep enough. Ah, here we go:
There’s the two Hungarian boys caught together, probably geeking out over the latest transcription of a circle dance from a remote Hungarian village like Kunadacs or some such place. Maybe after their rousing ethnomusicological escapades they enjoyed a hearty goulash and washed it down with a glass of potent pálinka. But we can merely speculate about details such as these…
One work of Kodály’s that exhibits his predilection for Hungarian folk music particularly well is his folk singspiel Háry János. It’s a pretty endearing story. The title character, János (kind of a Hungarian version of the name “John”) is the kind of guy who tells fantastic and captivating stories every night at the local tavern, stories chronicling his heroic feats of yesteryear. And you’re never quite sure what’s true because they always seem just plausible enough, but there’s never any way to verify the “facts”. These tall tales aren’t told out of malice; even if János is not quite on the level about his past his listeners are entertained for hours and leave with their imaginations enriched by fantastic adventures and the fascinating characters that fill them.
Long story short, the plot of the opera focuses on the Hungarian villager Háry János making his way to Vienna where he enlists in the army, is promoted, and almost single-handedly defeats Napoleon’s forces. But János is a man of humble desires, renouncing the honor and glory that ought to reward such deeds, out of preference for returning to his village life to live out his remaining years simply and regale his fellow drinkers with stories of his acts. The action of the opera switches back and forth between the present day inn where Háry János recounts his tales and scenes depicting his stories.
I’m sure you can catch a production of the full opera from time to time, but more commonly performed is the short and most enjoyable orchestral suite that Kodály compiled from Háry János, drawing on some of the very tuneful highlights of the work. You can listen to the whole suite in about 25 minutes and get a sense of the opera’s story without all the singing and acting. All of the movements are appealing, and the second movement of the suite, The Viennese Musical Clock, serves admirably to create a sense of the splendid cultural center in which János begins his fabled, illustrious military career.
Kodály’s musical clock easily captures its subject, evoking a sort of mechanical, toy-oriented orchestral color that can also be heard in other works. A few examples that come to my mind are Leopold Mozart’s Toy Symphony, Igor Stravinsky’s Petrouchka and Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, which feature all very similar orchestration, evoking a similar mechanical toy feeling to Kodály’s Musical Clock. The mechanical effect is created through a metric rhythmic insistence and orchestral emphasis on flute, trumpet and snare drum. Kodály’s orchestration also features chimes to represent the clock’s bells. The orchestration warms up toward the middle as other instruments are gradually added, but the outer moments of the piece leave the most lasting impression, driving home the mechanical feeling. The Musical Clock the kind of thing that can inspire particularly imaginative treatment from producers. Here’s a fun staging that I found:
The Viennese Musical Clock is actually Kodály evoking a different place than his home, although at that time it would have been within the same political border during the early part of Kodály’s life. Austria and Hungary did not become separate nations until the twentieth century, around the time that many old empires were toppling or dissolving, so it would be interesting to consider how Hungarians like Kodály and Bartók would have regarded Austrian music, and whether they ever felt any kinship to those traditions. Other movements in Háry János are unmistakably Hungarian. Just listen to the irresistible Intermezzo and try not to taste the goulash!
Ultimately Bartók surpassed Kodály as the reigning genius of modern Hungarian music in most musicians’ evaluation, but Kodály’s contributions are still with us, deeply informing our current disciplines of music education and ethnomusicology, and infusing their charming and much more audience-friendly color to the modern orchestral repertoire.
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