József Attila: On the dissonance of Bartók Béla

Abstract

In the autumn of 1936, József Attila initiated a meeting with Bartók Béla. He wished to present his plan for a study in the philosophy of art, which took the analysis of Bartók’s music as its point of departure. The text titled Medvetánc (Bear Dance) outlines the argument of the treatise in 15 points. Numerous interpretive attempts prove that József Attila scholarship has recognized the significance of this outline for a study. The analysis József Attila: On the dissonance of Bartók Béla undertakes an examination of this unfinished treatise. The outline represents a preparatory step toward developing József Attila’s late aesthetic theory of expression. Its central concept is sublimation, the spiritual transfiguration of instinctual content to a higher level. He identifies the unconscious entering the realm of self-awareness with the concept of dissonance, which stands at the center of interpreting Bartók’s music. Thus, in József Attila’s thinking, dissonance is the rawest form of the unconscious’s appearance in the domain of consciousness, clothed in the categories of articulated language. The artist’s task is to overcome and comprehend dissonance – the raw material of the work, burdened with contradictions and inner tensions – and to lead the linguistic text to consonance, the final state of the completed artwork. The conceptual network elaborated in the 15 points of the study outline serves as a terminological toolkit for reconstructing this process.