Elements of Moravian folk music in Janácek's Second string quartet
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Date
1994-08
Authors
Patty, Austin T.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Leos Janacek (1854-1928) was a composer from Moravia, a province of
Czechoslovakia. Moravian peasants maintained a musical tradition distinct from the folk
music of the neighboring provinces of Bohemian and Slovakia. Janacek's career as a
composer, initially rather inauspicious, underwent a radical change starting in 1888. The
catalyst for this change was his involvement in Moravian folk music. Janacek's
enthusiasm for his native folk music began with his first ethnographic excursions into
the Moravian countryside in 1888. The Introduction to this paper traces Janacek's
growth as a composer from his early conservatism to his mature, idiosyncratic style, fiddlers, and dulcimer players in the Second String Quartet. Janacek's transcriptions of
folk bands and individual folk instruments provide insights into how he transformed and
adapted folk practices. Janacek seems to have developed his use of motives throughout
the layers of his music from the folk practice of inserting motivic interjections in between
phrases. The Second String Quartet also uses accompaniment patterns found in
Moravian folk dances. Adopting folk techniques had many implications for Janacek's
static harmonies, as Chapter V points out.
Chapter VI shows how cadential patterns found in Moravian folk music are used
in the Second String Quartet. Furthermore, Janacek applied these patterns to higher
structural levels. For instance, the folk melodies sometimes outline the subtonic before
cadencing on the tonic; Janacek goes further by using the subtonic harmonically as a
contrast before returning to the tonic. Thus, the subdominant functions like the
dominant. This chapter discusses how both "Moravian modulation" and the use of the
mediant are additional ideas found in Moravian folk music which Janacek appropriated
on larger structural levels in the Second String Quartet.
Finally, Chapter VII deals with modes and degree inflection. Modes are treated
flexibly in Moravian folk music; often, modes are not firmly established since the scale
degrees of none of the modes predominate. Likewise, Janacek borrows freely from a
variety of modes sometimes establishing none, and furthermore, he uses the principle of
degree inflection harmonically.
Description
vii, 147 p. A THESIS Presented to School of Music and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Bachelor of Arts, August 1994. A print copy of this title is available through the UO Libraries under the call number: SCA Archiv Patty 1994
Keywords
Janacek, Leos, 1854-1928. Quartets, strings, no. 2, Folk music -- Czech Republic -- Moravia