Maróthy János: Music and the bourgeois, music and the proletarian (Budapest, 1974)
Part IV. The road of musical high culture through the negation of the bourgeois world picture to the proletarian world picture
A similar ultra-individual exaggeration, in exemplifying reality beyond the bounds of the individual, has been present in the hyperbolism of workers’ songs (for example, in workers’ ballads). e) In the large musical forms too, a general publicness reviving among the proletariat breaks up destroying the principle of “Ego- and song-centeredness”. Musically, this means that the songlike, symmetrical, iambic, periodic, rounded-off arches give way to a richer inner division (layé, sloganlike aphoristic formulae, ostinatic-variative structure, polytonality, polyrhythm, etc.). A method of this kind does not conceive in the traditional manner even the hymnic-rounded-off iambic arches inviting such interpretations as, for instance: Example 390 J II J>/7T]IJ J Ne - те, ha van,csak árríi - ved - jegy... but instead, it reflects the true character of Attila József’s poem, with its split-up “Skeltonics”, according to the structure-containing sharp, concise, aphoristic contrast-formulae, as:3 Example 391 ha van, csak á - rú- véd - jegy Neither here, nor elsewhere does this technique lead to an atomization of structure, (as often happens in the “anti-bourgeois” trends). The large units do not cease to exist, but are enriched, dynamized (in the present instance, for example, the choruslike declamation is fifth-centered, dividing a “great diatonic” melody arch), similar to the internally dynamized songlikeness of workers’ folk music. The principle of “division + wider unit” exerts itself just as much in the simpler genres (for example the polyrhythm and synthetic tonality of Khachaturian’s dance-movements) as in the broad complex forms (for example, Prokofiev’s theatrical and oratorial works) where the aphoristic intonation-signs and analytic approaches, the manifold “changes of visual angle”, polytonality, etc. finally make up a large form reflecting a unified world image. Thus, the break-up of bourgeois monocentricity built on the song and “chamber’’-like character asserts itself in this case not as a dissolution of unified world pictures in ’Vándor, Sándor-József, Attila: Mondd, mit érlel... (Tell me what ripens..), 1938. Translation of the quoted line: “His name, if he has one, is but a trade-mark . . .” Cf. with the whole history of “Skeltonism”, from the medieval “still-variative” layé, through Skelton himself and the Chartist poets up to Mayakovsky. 573