About this Piece

The year 1905 proved crucial for Béla Bartók, for that was when he and his friend and fellow Hungarian Zoltán Kodály became interested in their native folk music. On countless field trips into the countryside, the young composers collected and codified thousands of folk songs, enriching their country’s culture and, immeasurably, their own art. Nothing they wrote once the folk elements touched their lives was untouched by components that they were uncovering: irregular rhythms, unusual scale combinations and modes, severely simple melodies whose rise and fall stemmed from speech patterns, and passionate temperament. In addition to these characteristics, Bartók developed a driving, often barbaric element in his music including biting, clenched dissonances, and in contrast, wondrously provocative calms.  

In his piano music, the Bartók mix was served through a keyboard style that counted percussiveness as its chief component. Beginning with his solo piece the Allegro barbaro (1911) and extending to his later works, the composer took a literal view of the keyboard as percussion instrument. Not surprisingly, the composer’s own performances of his knotty music met with formidable public resistance. The year 1926 was a high-water mark for his piano compositions, which included the Sonata, Nine Little Piano Pieces, the First Piano Concerto, and Out of Doors.  

Out of Doors, given its name apparently because the titles of the pieces allude to pastoral settings, represents Bartók at his most uncompromising, which is to say at his most percussive, dissonant, demonic, and pianistically demanding. (The composer performed several of the pieces of the set publicly, but not all at one time.)  

The first, With Drums and Pipes, begins with the steady beating by both hands of a note cluster (D-E, F-G-flat) in the low bass. The beating, with either one hand or both, continues throughout the brief piece, with short modally inflected, semi-melodic interjections. Toward the end, the drumbeats build mightily until a single octave is held long enough for the sound to all but dissipate under which a final drumbeat, on the very lowest two notes of the keyboard, takes its last lick.  

Barcarolla has a constantly moving accompaniment typical of the boat-song genre. Repeated in various configurations, the water-simulating figures undulate under a folk-like melody set in frequently changing meters. The boat ride, not without some mysterious context, ends quietly.

Musettes is one of many examples of Bartók’s predilection for the bagpipe, specifically, a small French version of the instrument that was popular in 17th- and 18th-century aristocratic circles. Bartók encountered the bagpipe on his folk music expeditions and emulated it in several pieces. Musettes is filled with the sounds of the bagpipe—the fifths in the bass, the sound of air filling the instrument, the grace-note tremolos, the peasant melodies.

The Night’s Music turns the light on one of Bartók’s most distinctive additions to musical literature, the delineation, in an atmospheric, almost expressionist manner, of the sounds of nocturnal creatures. The piece is notated on three staves so that the performer may best understand the importance of each resonating strand of the music.  In this case, the device of a tone cluster (E-sharp to A) that is sounded throughout has a hypnotic effect that contributes to the myriad sounds that are set in motion.  

The Chase is expectedly very fast and often very loud, and repeatedly returns to two- or three-note textures, one of them being a five-note ostinato played in the bass (not always with the same notes). At the quick tempo of this chase, the five notes, always starting with a large descending skip, are extremely difficult to negotiate. But since their purpose is to create a whirlwind blur of sound, the pianist is off the hook in terms of clarity. The ending is enigmatic in that it occurs unexpectedly. Was the chased caught? Did the chaser just give up?

—Orrin Howard