Out of Doors Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

1. With Drums and Pipes 2. Barcarolle 3. Musette 4. The Night's Music 5. The Chase

1926 was a remarkable year for Béla Bartók’s piano music. Not only did he write the piano sonata, the first piano concert and the nine little pieces, he also wrote the piano suite Out of doors. Written between June and August 1926, Out of doors is a suite consists of five character pieces.

The commencing movement With Drums and Pipes explores the percussive charact with bass notes mimicking the drumbeat and pipes imitated in the middle register. It is considered as rhythmically and melodically similar to the first movement of the piano sonata and the first piano concerto, having the same 2/4 meter, the ostinatos, the repeated notes, the seconds and the use of tone clusters.

The following Barcarolle offers great contrast. It is a lyrical 6/8 boating song. The left hand plays legato arpeggiated chords, the meter and harmony changes imitate the uneven waves. The Musette depicts the sound of a pair of poorly tuned bagpipes by the drones and the chromatic ornamental twiddles of the primitive wind instrument, yet, there is almost no existence of the a melody line.

The Night's Music is dedicated to Ditta and this movement shows Bartok’s extraordinary sensitivity to the sounds of nature. The music imitates nocturnal sounds of crickets, frogs and the peasant flute. The technique employs to create the atmosphere at night is the contrast between the background ambience and the imitations of the night creatures. Blurred pp chords each introduced with a gruppetta of three notes are set as the background and continuously play by the left hand. Against the ambience are the twitterings, croaking and chirpings of the nocturnal animals. A folk tune and