Le 28 juin 2017
de 11h00 à 11h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3202
Séance - Contrasting Paths to Modernism: Bartók, Skalkottas and Christou
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Noel Torres-Rivera
The notion of intertextuality has been widely discussed within literary studies. Nonetheless, even though there are some substantial works that address the concept as applied to musical analysis, their concerns have only been slowly incorporated into the standard analytical practice. This paper takes as a case study the exposition of Bela Bartok’s Sonata for Solo Violin. Even though the influence of J.S. Bach on this Sonata has been widely acknowledged since its premiere in 1944, most analyses focus on aspects of pitch-class content and motivic development, implying an understanding of this musical text as self-contained and omitting interpretations that regard the meaning of some of its salient features in terms of its dialogue with both the music of Bach and other violin solo fugues. Bringing the issue to the foreground, and adapting some concepts from Harold Bloom’s theory of influence, this project considers the exposition of the second movement of Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin vis-à-vis two fugal works for solo: J.S. Bach’s Sonatafor Solo Violin no.1 and Eugene Ysaÿe’s Sonata no.1. Without making a historical claim, the paper suggests that the meaning of some seemingly stable structural aspects not only of Bartok’s fugue but also of Ysaÿe’s and Bach’s can be considered as dependent on its dynamic position within the proposed network of musical texts. Through the analysis two broad issues are addressed: first, the intertextual nature of any musical text and its repercussions on formal analysis; second, the consideration of twentieth-century composers’ understandings of eighteen-century fugal writing.
