Sonic Asymmetry

Bela Bartok: “Allegro Barbaro”

ベラ・バートク：「アレグロ・バルバロ」

TIME COMMITMENT: 2 minutes

Martial, rumpled and always on the precipice of chaos, this psychodrama is prised open by its maniacal dedication to demented accelerations.  Bartok’s expertise is exhibited here in full: scurrying runners that grow ever louder and intense, just as the pace slows down.  The composition functions with more urgency when performed for solo piano, but the orchestral timbres may have infected Akira Ifukube’s stomping anthems which hailed Godzilla’s imminent appearance in Toho Studio’s classic monster flicks.

MUSIC

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegro_barbaro_(Bart%C3%B3k)

A REFLECTION

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.

And some of our men just in from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

Constantine Cavafy: “Waiting for the Barbarians”