| In his ethnomusicological writings and lectures, Bela Bartok describes folk music as "a natural product, just like the various forms of animal and vegetable life" and elaborates this view, going on to describe a collection of developmental processes modeled explicitly on biological evolution. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I characterize Bartok's evolutionary model by isolating his core claims; I determine to what extent he understood this evolution as continuing into art music; and finally, by examining both Bartok's relationship to other evolutionary historiographies of music and the writings of his close contemporaries, I place his model within its cultural and intellectual context. In the next two chapters, I develop a method for interpreting and analyzing Bartok's music engendered from this evolutionary model, a method that involves the elaboration of two ideas: (1) a conceptual shift from a relatively historically static major/minor tonality to a multivalent, "evolving" tonality, and (2) the reconception of motives or themes as having no single original forms, but rather as being related genetically, as somehow evolving in their own right. Through analyses of The Wooden Prince and the Second String Quartet (both composed between 1914 and 1917), the last two chapters serve as extended demonstrations of my interpretive/analytical method. This dissertation, overall, is a hybrid of the history of music theory, historical aesthetics, and music analysis. In terms of the latter, it has strong roots in both transformation theory and interval-cycle theory, both of which it seeks to historicize. My ultimate goal, however, is to show how Bartok's evolutionary model can function as an account of historical change capable of accommodating the apparent contradiction between his music being truly radical yet also maintaining a deep connection to tradition. |
