February 2023: Katalin Koltai premiered two pieces from my ongoing Bartókiana project at the Budapest Music Centre. The concert included talks by Katalin, myself and David Gorton with the latter two simultaneously translated into Hungarian. The pieces Katalin premiered were my transcription of Bartók’s Romanian Christmas Carols and Flute of the Slovak Shepherd from For Children. Bartókiana is composed for the ‘Ligeti Guitar‘, an instrument designed by Katalin that uses magnetic capos in order to independently adjust the pitch of the guitar’s open strings. The capos provide the guitarist and composer with the ability to radically transform the open string ‘background’ of the guitar and can permit all sorts of new chord spacings and textures. This having been said, the capos are tricky to navigate for the non-guitarist particularly when trying to mediate between their affordances and another composer’s music. There are times I have used magnet settings that have proved to be redundant or asked for changes, particularly when Katalin is still playing, that have proved impractical. This partly explains why Bartókiana is proving such a long-running project – the piece was begun in earnest in 2021 and I am still deeply involved in it, currently reworking several of its component pieces. Once completed Bartókiana will consist of ten transcription of various kinds covering Bartók’s folk arrangements from each geographical area he collected in including North Africa and Turkey. Bartók’s musical personality and technique are, of course, formidable and I have had to work hard not to let his style overwhelm my own, hence the number of revisions made so far. Bartókiana is very much a work in progress but I’ll get there.
