Bartók’s Hungarian Musical Avant-Gardism
Bartók’s Hungarian Musical Avant-Gardism

Summary/Abstract: According to Lajos Kassák’s recollections in 1961, Bartók found elements in his poetry that lay close to his own experiments in music. In a 1926 interview, however, in which he emphasized the closeness of his art to that of poet Endre Ady, Bartók unambiguously stated that the idea of Kassák and his circle to link his music with their journal was founded on a mistake. Was Bartók then really close to those few representatives of Hungarian avant-garde in the later 1910s when his art was enthusiastically propagated in the periodical MA [Today]? Bartók’s changing attitude to musical modernism and the meaning of a “Rembrantian concept,” almost casually mentioned in the same 1926 interview and obviously meant to refer to an idea markedly different from that of the so-called “activists,” are discussed in the essay with reference to the composer’s public and private writings as well as the stylistic development of his music especially between 1908 and 1926.

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