Difficult Listening Hour

Aaron Jones September 8, 2015 No Comments

I have to be careful when I listen to Bartok’s string quartets. They can freak me out and leave me feeling like I’m in a scene from The Shining. Stanley Kubrick kinda ruined Bartok for many people because he used and abused his music for many of his most terrifying scenes. However, this is Difficult Listening Hour, so I’m going to ask you to clear all movie references out of your mind and to just dive in.

This week we are featuring the String Quartet as our genre for Difficult Listening Hour. It’s music that normally only super duper classical music snobs would even know about, but since you read iroots.org, you get to experience it too!

Before we get to the Bartok, I’m going to let Laurie Anderson open our show with a little introduction to Difficult Listening Hour. However, there’s a catch. If you watch this weird little intro, you must promise to dive into the string quartet down below for at least a 3 minute try. Is it a deal?

Back to business…

The best experience I’ve had listening to Bartok is when I put it on the speakers REALLY LOUD and I get busy doing something, cooking, reading or writing. I forget that it’s on and suddenly realize why I feel like I’m having a dramatic/Romantic nervous breakdown. I particularly love the movement starting at 16:30—hey, it’s almost pleasant to hear! Enjoy:

The String Quartet No. 4 by Béla Bartók was written from July to September 1928[1] in Budapest. It is one of six string quartets by Bartok. Read more here.

Bartók’s musical vocabulary, as demonstrated in his string quartets particularly, departs from traditional use of major and minor keys, focusing more on the chromatic scale and attempting to utilize each note equally. [He often divides] the semitone scale into symmetrical units…He also incorporates whole-tone, pentatonic, and octatonic scales — as well as diatonic and heptatonia seconda scales — as subsets of the chromatic scale.

His use of these subset scales allowed him to incorporate a wide range of folk music in an expanded harmonic system. Indeed, his original studies and settings of many examples gleaned from his extensive explorations of the Hungarian countryside and Eastern and Central Europe, undoubtedly served as a major influence upon his expanded musical vocabulary.

Next up, an innovative performance of the Penderecki String Quartet no.1 and excerpt of String Quartet no.3 by Marcin Markowicz remixed live by an electronic group called PUNKT. Skip ahead to 3:16 to get to the live remix part: