Elliott Antokoletz Boeken

Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartók explores the means by which two early 20th century operas - Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) - transformed the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language. It also looks at how this language reflects the psychodramatic symbolism of the Franco-Belgian poet, Maurice Maeterlinck, and his Hungarian disciple, Béla Balázs. These two operas represent the first significant attempts to establish more profound correspondences between the symbolist dramatic conception and the new musical language. Duke Bluebeard's Castle is based almost exclusively on interactions between pentatonic/diatonic folk modalities and their more abstract symmetrical transformations (including whole-tone, octatonic, and other pitch constructions derived from the system of the interval cycles). The opposition of these two harmonic extremes serve as the basis fordramatic polarity between the characters as real-life beings and as instruments of fate. The book also explores the new musico-dramatic relations within their larger historical, social psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts.

This book provides not only an understanding and appreciation of Georg von Albrecht’s musical art, but also links his compositional approach to a broader historical and theoretical context. The significance of the study lies in the discovery of a «missing historical link» in the evolution of principles that range from the pentatonic formations and modalities of folk music and polymodal combination to the more abstract realm of serial procedures. These principles often unfold in contexts based on complex metric/rhythmic formulizations. Albrecht, whose folkloristic activities and compositional inclinations invoke the creative spirit of Béla Bartók, is an exemplar of a composer who has synthesized traditional and contemporary elements from both Eastern and Western European sources. He was inspired by many cultures, his music imbued with Byzantine and ancient Greek elements, Hebrew folklore, and Gregorian elements, as well as the pentatonicism of Eastern Asia. Russian and Lithuanian folklore underlies virtually all of his works. Albrecht’s profound reflections on music as well as the remarkable range of his compositional aesthetics and techniques still provide the music historian with a new level of insight into some essential links in the evolution of twentieth-century music and thought.

The International Journal of Musicology is an open forum for musicological research. The editors hope to further the dialogue between different fields of musicology as well as between musicology and neighboring disciplines. The Journal contains articles on: New historical material, analysis of musical texts, musical genres, style periods of musical history, musical theory, history of reception, and other related topics.