Daphne Leong
Rhythmic and metric structures play strategic roles in Béla Bartók's music. Where such structures conflict, some analysts point to resolution of the conflict as a basic narrative. Paul Wilson, for example, describes a decreasing complexity in the metric patterns of the first movement of Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. This paper, however, suggests that such metric clarification does not provide an adequate description of the metric processes occurring within the movement, and proposes an alternate interpretation.
Drawing on work by Richard Cohn, Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff,
Maury Yeston, and Harald Krebs, the paper defines well-formed
metric hierarchies and proposes a notational system for such hierarchies.
The system incorporates the concepts of time-point class or beat
class proposed by Milton Babbitt, David Lewin, and Robert Morris,
and uses such concepts to describe metric motivic structures and
their transformations.
Application of the system to the first movement of Bartók's
Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion reveals a characteristic
metric motive underlying all four themes of the sonata form movement.
The motive consists of duple units within a framework of 9/8 meter.
This dupleness predominates on both eighth and dotted quarter
note levels, resolving to triple units at key points. However,
focus on this putative resolution neglects the duple units which
continue to play against the emerging triple units. It also neglects
the reinstatement of the basic metric motive, with its duple implications,
at a strategic point in the movement---its ending.
The study thus substantiates a different narrative of metric transformation
than that of metric clarification in the first movement of Bartók's
Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. This new narrative
emphasizes the dialectic between a synthesis of duple and triple
units at various levels of metrical structure.