Vera Lampert

The Lure of Africa: Béla Bartók's Journey to Biskra

 

...

But why Biskra? If Bartók had considered revisiting Morocco at all, he was soon forced to change his mind with the advent of the Agadir crisis, just when he headed for Paris to gather information for his African trip. On July 1st, the arrival of a German warship at the port of Agadir sparked off international tension and foreshadowed the conflicts of the First World War. Thus Algeria must have seemed a better destination. Moreover, as János Kárpáti suggested in his studies of Bartók's African collecting tour, Bartók probably envisioned following Hornbostel, who had studied Tunisian music. Opting for Algeria, Bartók could have expected to find something akin, but at an unexplored location. According to the recollections of Bartók's first wife, Márta Ziegler, who accompanied him on his African collecting trip, Bartók selected Biskra as the destination on the recommendation of his 1909 Baedeker, which described it as a place having a relatively pleasant climate. Biskra, a large oasis some three or four miles long and a half mile wide, with an immense number of palm trees and plenty of water, is at the edge of the Sahara desert, and it was also the terminal station of the north-south railway. Bartók hoped to find genuine folk material there and in a few other oases in the vicinity. In other words, Biskra had the promise of relatively easy access and yet some unbeaten paths for research. Indeed, by the first decade of the twentieth century, Biskra had become a fashionable spot for winter vacations.According to a review of a 1903 German travel book (Nach der Oase Tugurt in der Wüste Sahara), the area was "visited by more and more tourists every year". A British publication of the same year bears the inviting title Beautiful Biskra, "The Queen of the Desert". In 1906, another German guide, entitled simply Biskra, was advertised as a book

that gives vivid impressions of "the famous oasis, health resort and center of date palms, where many tourists now get a glimpse of the Sahara." Still another review of a guide (Biskra, Sid-Okba and the Desert, 1910) asserted that "the ease and rapidity of travel in Algeria so far as the railway extends is remarkable."1 Presumably Bartók had a chance to leaf through some of these travel-books; while in Paris making preparations for his trip he complained to his wife: "It is a pity that North Africa has become so popular a destination for visitors. This is why guides are made." During the nineteenth century, North Africa was an extremely popular destination for writers, artists and musicians in search of exotic flavour. There was a whole school of painters, numbering in their hundreds, who were commonly referred to as the Orientalists (the Hungarian Gyula Tornai was one of them). Their realistic, sumptuous style was popular for a while but had gone out of favour by the end of the century, and is being rediscovered and newly appreciated only recently.2 During the first two decades of the twentieth century, North African landscapes and ambience again became an important inspiration for artists, playing a remarkable role in the evolution of abstract painting. Wassily Kandinsky visited Tunis in the winter of 1904-1905, Paul Klee and August Macke in 1914. Henri Matisse toured Algeria in 1906 and remembered Biskra as "a superb oasis, a lovely and fresh thing in the middle of the desert, with a great deal of water that snaked through the palm trees, through the gardens, with their very green leaves, which is somewhat astonishing when one comes through the desert." One of Matisse's seminal works, heralding his new, sculptural style, the Blue Nude, is subtitled Souvenir of Biskra.3

...

János Kárpáti, editor, László Vikárius, coeditor and István Pávai, technical editor, created something on a much larger scale than would have been possible through the traditional medium of a book and long playing record: they published on a single CD-ROM the entire recorded Biskra collection with all the relevant printed, manuscript and pictorial material. In addition, Bartók's study, "Arab Folk Music in the Biskra District", can be accessed, along with two other writings of his that document his involvement with the first Congress of Arab Music, held in Cairo in 1932. A selection from Bartók's correspondence completes the written documents. Considerable space is devoted to studies appraising Bartók's work on Arab folk music and there are a series of tracks illustrating the influence of Arab music on Bartók's compositions. Finally, some pictorial material related to Bartók's trips to North Africa is included. The main menu is in English and Hungarian. Most of the documents, however, are published only in their original languages. One exception is the first item on the navigation frame, the editor's Preface which outlines the history of Bartók's visits to Africa and his work on Arab folk music, and describes the CD's contents. In the first major section, Bartók's Studies, his article "Arab Folk Music in the Biskra District" is presented in several versions and languages. Besides the original Hungarian version, the somewhat different German version is presented twice: in its edited version and in a facsimile of the original publication. French, English and Hungarian translations are provided for this German version. The original Hungarian version, of which only the first part was published in Bartók's lifetime, is here in its recently published full version, completed from Bartók's manuscript. Except for the facsimile, all the other versions went through ingenious editing to profit from the potential of digital media. The texts are provided with hyperlinks to the notes and carefully labelled whether they are Bartók's or the editors'. Through another welcome editorial intervention, the notes to the musical examples now appear next to the music to which they refer. All these extra features make the texts ever so much easier to read than the printed versions. In addition, there are hyperlinks to the sound tracks of the recordings, if the musical examples happen to represent a recording from a surviving cylinder. To be able to hear the music when reading about it, by just clicking on the link, enhances one's understanding and enjoyment of this study tremendously. Bartók's two other studies having relevance to Arab music were written for and about the 1932 Congress of Arab Music in Cairo. The invitation for Bartók to participate at the congress might have originated from Robert Lachmann, initiator of the Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der Musik des Orients (1930) and editor of the society's journal, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, where Bartók's report on the Cairo conference was published. Lachmann headed the Phonogram Commission charged with recording music at the Congress of Arab Music; this was the committee on which Bartók also served. One of the documents included in this section of Bartók's studies is a draft of recommendations on several issues in preserving and disseminating Arab music. The draft, written in French, was first published by Denijs Dille in the fourth volume of Documenta Bartókiana with a German translation. Here only the original French text is presented with Dille's German commentaries. The second essay, written and published in German, appeared with other reports under the title "Zum Kongress für Arabische Musik-Kairo, 1932".

Recalling the performance of an outstanding group of Iraqi musicians, in this article Bartók drew a connection for the first time between a certain ancient type of song that Ukrainians call dumy and songs he heard from Romanian peasants and in North Africa. (Because of a copying mistake, this crucial sentence unfortunately is incomplete on the CD-ROM.) The essay is presented here in the original German, but readers of English and Hungarian may want to know that this study is available elsewhere in both English and Hungarian.4 The core of the CD-ROM is the second section, Bartók's Phonograph Recordings and Autograph Transcriptions: tracks of the surviving phonograph cylinders, accompanied by the notes from Bartók's small music notebook that he used on the field trip, the draft transcriptions he made at home from the recordings and the fair copies of the latter, the so-called "master sheets" that served further analysis and systematisation. Compiling and matching this large and diverse material must have presented a considerable challenge. Vikárius, head of the Budapest Bartók Archives, wrote in his study on the sources of Bartók's Arab collection (see further below): What has been attempted here is to put together scattered pieces of what at first appears to be a real jigsaw puzzle. Although a large amount of sources has been preserved from Bartók's Arab collection, they are unfortunately far from complete and very often either only the sound recording or only the transcription survives. This has made the identification of the existing recordings difficult, especially because of a few misplacements, as in the few cases when the boxes contained the wrong cylinder. But everything fits together wonderfully. A large spreadsheet, starting with the list of all the 118 cylinder numbers, shows which recordings survived, where the corresponding notes are in the field book, where the first transcriptions can be found, the existence of the master sheets and their copies, and finally the (differing) numbers of the musical examples in the two published versions of Bartók's study. Occasional notes appear in the extreme right column. The colour coding of the rows shows at a glance if a recording is preserved or not, if the surviving recording has a corresponding transcription or not, and if there is a transcription belonging to a lost recording. All in all, 96 cylinders are extant, and fortunately, most of the lost recordings were transcribed by Bartók. Thus, in one form or another, almost the entire Arab collection has been preserved. This comprehensive publication now makes it available for study and, indeed, its real purport can be fully assessed for the first time. Why Bartók skipped some of the recordings when he made the transcriptions, or why he chose certain melodies over others to illustrate his study, are questions that might also be investigated. Finally, this publication offers an unparalleled opportunity to the community of Bartók scholars and ethnomusicologists to study the entire process of Bartók's working method in minute detail. Every item on the table denoting a recording or manuscript is provided with a hyperlink. Clicking on the number of an existing phonograph cylinder starts the music, while a click on the pages of the field book, on the fascicle of first transcriptions, or on the numbers of the master sheets produces a facsimile. Documents that belong together are displayed on a single sheet so that they can be studied at once without going back to the spreadsheet.

¹ These reviews are to be found in the JSTOR database.

² Lynne Thornton: The Orientalists: Painter-Travellers, 1828-1908. Paris: ACR International, 1983.

³ Jack Flam: Matisse in The Cone Collection: The Poetics of Vision. The Baltimore Museum of Art, 2001, p. 40.

⁴ In Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976, and in Bartók Béla összegyujtött írásai, I., ed. András Szôllôsy. Budapest, Zenemukiadó Vállalat, 1966.

 

Vera Lampert
was on the staff of the Budapest Bartók Archives between 1969 and 1978. Since 1983 she has been a Music Catalog Librarian at Brandeis University. Her book on the sources of Bartók's folk song arrangements was published in Hungarian in 1980 and 2005; its English version is expected to appear later this year.