Concealed Fragmentariness: On the Compositional Process of Bartók's String Quartets

Abstract

The present paper is a preliminary study to a deeper understanding of Bartók's compositional process: how he filled the music paper even if the notation appears continuous. He did not always write the draft from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner but occasionally skipped some measures or phrases that he intended to write down later. Thus, the continuity draft is not necessarily regarded as a continuity; it might have consisted of fragments but they have been eventually concealed in the final form of the draft. This may directly affect our interpretation of Bartók's creative process. The present research takes the visual appearance of a draft as a clue to examine its hypothetical fragmentariness. Beginning with the examination of some actual blank spaces that were never filled, the paper deals with cases where the original existence of fragments is suggested by the extraordinary appearance of the draft, such as a blank space at the end of a system, notations in the margin, re-organization of bar-lines, etc. Besides systematic approaches to fragmentariness, the author offers some interpretation concerning the reasons why Bartók did not write the draft in an ordinary way. There might have been different explanations for the interruption of the linear compositional process. One of the important findings of this paper is that Bartók's bar-lines do not always mark metric accents but sometimes simply facilitate the performers' orientation. Even though the occasional special function of some of his bar-lines as mere markers of orientation is explained by Bartók in a letter to Rudolf Kolisch, the existence of philological evidence to this effect may further underline its validity and importance.