Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos (not the BTS song) is a six-volume collection of short pedagogical piano pieces. The early volumes are beginner-level exercises, and the later ones are professional-level challenges. They’re all pretty strange. My favorite is number 86, “Two Major Pentachords,” a counterpoint exercise where the right hand plays in C major and the left hand plays in F-sharp major. “Hot Cross Buns,” this is not.
Mikrokosmos Number 133 is called “Syncopation,” and as the name suggests, it’s a study of complex rhythms. Here’s a recording of it by Bartók himself:
Bartók composed Mikrokosmos No 133 in the summer of 1932, one of dozens of short works that he wrote during a productive vacation. The funny thing is that the first half of the piece doesn’t technically use any syncopation at all. The time signature is changing constantly, but the rhythmic groupings don’t cross the barlines. There does start to be syncopation in the second half, where the time signatures settles into steady 4/4, and the asymmetric note groupings scatter across the grid seemingly at random. You need a steady underlying meter for deviations from that meter to be meaningful.
I learned from Yusuke Nakahara’s dissertation that Bartók originally wrote the whole piece in 4/4. Then he moved the bar lines around in the first half to create all the time signature changes. I wonder whether he was trying to show you two different ways of thinking about odd metrical groupings: first, as unsyncopated with lots of meter shifts, and then in steady meter but with lots of syncopation. It would be easier to keep a grip on all the rhythmic complexity if the harmony was simpler, but that is not how Bartók rolls. Mikrokosmos 133 uses all twelve chromatic pitches. Nakahara says that it’s not systematic like a serialist composition, that the harmony is intuitive. You can hear what he means at 0:26, where Bartók repeats a cluster chord several times, stacking another semitone on top each time. Mostly he’s as serious as a heart attack, but I appreciate the playful quality of this little passage.
Here’s my remix of Mikrokosmos 133 using the Amen break to reinforce the changing meter:
There’s rich untapped potential for turning Bartók’s music into drum n bass or other experimental electronic dance music subgenres. What do you say, producers?
I teach private piano, and ALL of my students use Mikrokosmos, first as a sight-reading tool, then just to bend their minds around the potential use of dissonance and non-intuitive meter/rhythm. What strikes me when I listen to recordings of Bartók playing is how LYRICAL he is as a performer, even in music that doesn’t lend itself to lyricism. He always transcends the difficult rhythms, harmonies, and melodic content and imbues his pieces with musicality. I love to have a student struggle with one of his pieces, savagely beating it into submission, then allowing them to hear the composer play with a lighter, more nuanced touch. Mind-blowing.