Cooper, D orcid.org/0000-0001-7308-6640 (2021) Bartók, Biography, and the Violin. Studia Musicologica, 62 (1-2). pp. 5-23. ISSN 1788-6244
Abstract
Biography takes the scant facts of a life that are available to scrutiny, like the waypoints on a journey to be mapped, and attempts to form a coherent narrative from them. That coherence is, to at least some degree, contingent upon the ideological position of the author and as Michael Benton has noted, “the biographical subject is a textual creation as much as a historical recreation.” While fully acknowledging that one cannot “read back” from the works of an author to their life, Benton has described the substance of literary outputs as “quasi-facts” to be set beside “historical facts” and argued that these “can be seen as reflecting some contemporary events or as sublimating some experiences in the writer’s past or mirroring some authorial state of mind.” This article draws on the First Violin Sonata as such a quasi-fact of Bartók’s life to question whether biographical information can or should impact the ways that we understand and perform his music. The article additionally considers whether the content of individual works as mental products may have something tangible to impart about their composer’s personality. Given the broad consensus around the so-called “Five-Factor Model” of personality measurement within the field of psychology, it speculates whether this might offer a tool to refine our portrait of Bartók through analysis of his music.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest. This is an author produced version of an article published in Studia Musicologica. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Bartók; biography; personality; Sonata for Violin and Piano no. 1 |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Music (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 10 Jan 2022 14:15 |
Last Modified: | 14 Apr 2022 00:41 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Akadémiai Kiadó |
Identification Number: | 10.1556/6.2021.00002 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:181866 |