of Tahiti. It animated various other contemporaneous cultural phenomena, such as Zola’s novels of miners and prostitutes, Maxim Gorky’s exacting portraits of peasant life, and Isadora Duncan’s free, anti formal dancing. In whatever medium, artists worked to dispel artifice and convey the materiality of things.
What would it mean for music to render life “just as it is,” in van Gogh’s phrase? Composers had been pondering that question for centuries, and, at various times and in different ways, they had infused their work with the rhythms of everyday life. The Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder had proposed that composers find inspiration in Volkslieder, or folk songs—a phrase he coined. Countless nineteenth-century composers installed folkish themes in symphonic and operatic forms. But they tended to take their tunes from published collections, thereby filtering them through the conventions of musical notation—major and minor scales, regular bar lines, strict rhythm, and the rest. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, scholars in the nascent field of ethnomusicology began to apply more meticulous, quasi-scientific methods, and came to the realization that Western notation was inadequate to the task. Debussy, browsing through the multicultural sounds that were on display at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, had noticed how the music fell between the cracks of the Western notational system.
The advent of the recording cylinder meant that researchers no longer needed to rely on paper to preserve the songs. They could make recorded copies of the music and study it until they understood how it worked. The machine changed how people listened to folk music; it made them aware of deep cultural differences. Of course, the machine was itself helping to erase those differences, by spreading American-style pop music as a global lingua franca.
Percy Grainger, the Australian-born maverick pianist-composer, was among the first to apply the phonograph’s lessons. In the summer of 1906, Grainger ventured out into small towns in the English countryside with an Edison Bell cylinder, charming the locals with his rugged, unorthodox personality. Back home, he played his recordings over and over, slowing down the playback to catch the details. He paid attention to the notes between the notes—the bending of pitch, the coarsening of timbre, the speeding up and slowing down of pulse. He then tried to replicate that freedom in his compositions. In 1908 he heard a Devon sailor sing the sea shanty “Shallow Brown,” and later fashioned from it a symphonic song for soprano, chorus, and a unique chamber orchestra that included guitars, ukuleles, and mandolins. The ensemble creates a fantastic simulacrum of the sea, as pungent as any paragraph in Melville’s Moby-Dick. String tremolos churn like surf, high woodwinds squawk like gulls, lower instruments hint at terrible creatures in the depths. The voice sails above, bursting outside bar lines to drive the emotion home: “Shallow Brown, you’re going to leave me …” With each performance, John Perring, the man whom Grainger originally recorded with his cylinder, sings his song again, and the orchestra preserves the grain of the voice as a machine could never do.
The best way to absorb a culture is to be from it. Three great “realists” in early-twentieth-century music—Janáček, Bartók, and Ravel—were born in villages or outlying towns in their respective homelands: Hukvaldy in Moravia, Nagyszentmiklós in Hungary, and Ciboure in the French Basque country. Although they were trained in the cities, and remained city dwellers for most of their lives, these composers never shook the feeling that they had come from somewhere else.
Janáček’s father served as kantor—schoolmaster and music master—of the remote hamlet of Hukvaldy. As Mirka Zemanová writes in her Janáček biography, he was hardly better off than the peasants he taught; the family lived in one room of the damp, rundown school house. At the age of eleven, Leoš received a scholarship to attend choir school in Brno, and his parents welcomed the award because they could not afford to feed all their children. He went on to study in Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna, compensating for his humble origins with a fierce work ethic. In the 1880s he founded the Brno organ school, which later became the Brno Conservatory, and began to enjoy local success as a composer in a Romantic-nationalist vein.
Then, on a trip home in 1885, Janáček experienced the street music of his village with fresh ears. In a later essay he recalled: “Flashing movements, the faces sticky with sweat; screams, whooping, the fury of fiddlers’ music: it was like a picture glued on to a limpid grey background.” Like van Gogh, he would paint the peasants as they were, not in their Sunday best.
When Janáček began collecting Czech, Moravian, and Slovakian folk songs, he wasn’t listening for raw material that could be “ennobled” in classical forms. Instead, he wanted to ennoble himself. Melody, he decided, should fit the pitches and rhythms of ordinary speech, sometimes literally. Janáček did research in cafés and other public places, transcribing on music paper the conversations he heard around him. For example, when a student says “Dobry večer,” or “Good evening,” to his professor, he employs a falling pattern, a high note followed by three at a lower pitch. When the same student utters the same greeting to a pretty servant girl, the last note is slightly higher than the others, implying coy familiarity. Such minute differences, Janáček thought, could engender a new operatic naturalism; they could show an “entire being in a photographic instant.”
The oldest of the chief innovators of early-twentieth-century music, Janáček was almost fifty when he finished his first masterpiece, the opera Jenůfa, in 1903. Like Pelléas and Salome, written in the same period, Jenůfa, is a direct setting of a prose text. The melodies not only imitate the rise and fall of conversational speech but also illustrate the characteristics of each personality in the drama. For example, there is a marked musical distinction between Jenůfa, a village girl of pure and somewhat foolish innocence who has a baby out of wedlock with the local rake, and the Kostelnička (sextoness), her devout stepmother, who eventually murders the baby in an effort to preserve the family reputation. In the opening scene of Act II, the Kostelnička sings in abrupt, acerbic phrases, sometimes leaping over large intervals and sometimes jabbing away at a single note. Jenůfa’s melodies, by contrast, follow more easygoing, ingratiating contours. Behind the individual characterizations are pinwheeling patterns that mimic the turning of the local mill wheel, the meticulous operation of social codes, or the grinding of fate. The harmonies often have a disconcerting brightness, all flashing treble and rumbling bass. The coexistence of expressive freedom and notated rigidity in the playing suggests rural life in all its complexity.
Jenůfa seems destined to end in tragedy. The heroine’s baby is found beneath the ice of the local river; the villagers advance on her with vengeful intent. Then the Kostelnička confesses that she did the deed, and they redirect their rage. Jenůfa is left alone with her cousin Laca, who has loved her silently while she has pursued the good-for-nothing Števa. Time stops for a luxurious instant: the orchestra wallows in elemental C major. Then, over pulsing, heavy-breathing chords, violins and soprano begin to sing a new melody in the vicinity of B-flat—a sustained note followed by a quickly shaking figure, which moves like a bird in flight, gliding, beating its wings, dipping down, and soaring again. This is Jenůfa’s loving resignation as she gives Laca permission to walk away from the ugliness surrounding her. Another theme surfaces, this one coursing down the octave. It is Laca answering: “I would bear far more than that for you. What does the world matter, when we have each other?” The two sing each other’s melodies in turn, the melodies merge, and the opera ends in a tonal sunburst.
Janáček, like Mahler, talked about listening to the chords of nature. While working on his cantata Amarus, he wrote: “Innumerable notes ring in my ears, in every octave; they have voices like small, faint telegraph bells.” These natural sounds are linked to the opera’s tough-natured emotional world, the hard-won love of a man and a woman in the wake of a terrible crime. No wonder audiences in Vienna and other European capitals were struck by Jenůfa when it finally made its way past Czech borders in the year 1918. Following the devastation of war, Janáček had unleashed the shock of hope.
Bartók’s father, like Janáček’s, was a teacher who worked with the rural population, running an agricultural school that aimed to introduce modern farming methods to the Hungarian
