 2016 - 2017 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 0845-4127-01 | Bela Bartok | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 4.0
Course description
This course aims to provide introduction to the music, aesthetics and cultural context of the composer Béla Bartók. Bartók is one of the greatest artists of 20th century avant-garde music. Besides the inexhaustible fantasy and emotional power of his works, Bartók’s life exemplifies the morality and responsibility of the artist of the era and his works are the expression also of this morality. The course cannot aim at the discussion of even all major works. Its primary purpose will be to help students to gain a new perspective and be able to approach Bartók’s works with relevant questions regarding the music’s emotional and aesthetic meaning/message. One important aim of the course is to provide contextual knowledge that is indispensable for the interpretation of Bartók’s music: his ethnomusicological oeuvre and the nature of folk musics he studied, the socio-cultural context of Central Europe, and within it, Hungary, and the artistic trends and ideas of the time. The pillar of the course will be Bartók’s major composition Music for String, Percussion and Celesta (1936). This work will be analyzed at depth and will be regarded as the starting point for the discussion of a variety of other key-issues of Bartók’s music.