Music: Patient Listener

For 16 months he has been in a tiny padded cell, this frail little man with glittering eyes and a gentle smile—five hours a day, four days a week. He is not crazy, just listening. The man is Hungary’s eminent composer and music scholar, Bela Bartok (Piano Concertos, Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion Instruments, MikroKosmos). The cell is a phonograph-listening room at Columbia University. He is listening to some 2,500 double-sided aluminum phonograph discs on which is impressed the largest recorded collection of Yugoslav folk songs ever made.

They were made in Yugoslavia in 1933 and 1934 by the late Harvard professor Milman Parry, for purely philological purposes. Bela Bartok is transcribing them for musical purposes. For most of these songs, handed down from generation to generation, have never before been put on paper.

Strange to U.S. ears are the songs Bela Bartok listens to. The 300 discs of love songs, recorded in wild, mountainous Herzegovina, have irregular, formless lines, queer vocal embellishments. Stranger still are the heroic songs, long, rambling tales of adventure and battle (the longest takes twelve hours to sing; many are several thousand lines long). They are chanted to a singsong type of melody, half speech, half music, whose short phrases are repeated with endless monotony. Under the voice runs a twanging countermelody, plucked out on the one-stringed gusla.

Even Bartok finds transcribing such music difficult and laborious. He runs the turntable at a slow speed, so that a woman’s voice sounds like a man’s, a man’s like a growl. In this way he can hear details more clearly. Says he: “It is like looking through a microscope.” After every bar or two, he must lift the needle to write down what he has heard. Folk tunes are seldom sung precisely the same way twice; noting the slight variations is an important, tricky part of his work.

By next fall Composer Bartok will have ready for publication a fat, scholarly book containing 75 of the best Yugoslav love songs. Whatever happens to heroic Draja Mihailovich and his warriors, the voice of Yugoslavia will be preserved.