A triumph of Swarthmore’s Cooper Series, Bartók’s Monster featured Pig Iron Theatre Company, a company founded by Swarthmore alumni, in collaboration with a Philadelphia-based string quartet and the next generation of Swarthmore artists. In a world where symphonies are crumbling, theater companies are struggling to fund productions, and artists have been grappling with how to present their work in modern society, “Bartók’s Monster” takes a decisive step towards a new form of artistic communication.
The well-crafted objects constituting the set, from the visibly analog construction of insects in Bartók’s collection and little lighted jars that held them to the almost otherworldly swaying of a giant cardboard cone and tower of paper boulders, delightfully accentuated the subtle and sophisticated color palette of the show. Viewers of Pig Iron’s recent production “Franklin’s Key” will have recognized the meticulous attention to detail in the production’s physical aspects that are emblematic of the company. The precise and articulate movements of Swarthmore’s ensemble — or “movers,” as they are called — should be celebrated.
I eagerly anticipated the production. The Daedalus Quartet, a staple of Philadelphia’s chamber music scene, is collaborating with THE Pig Iron Theatre Company, founded by Swarthmore alumni in 1995? It’s enough to make any music and theater-focused student start drooling. This excitement carried over during my viewing of the production, manifesting itself in a deep optimism for the future of art; how can the performing arts wither if spurred on by the development of novel forms? It felt as if the possibilities were just beginning to open up for more effective forms of communication.
“Bartók’s Monster” has the feel of a prototype. It took several days of thinking to sort through all the reasons why, and as I did, I realized that Bartók’s Monster serves as a useful case study into what I believe makes art effective.
The theory of “Gebrauchsmusik,” championed by composers such as Kurt Weill (incidentally, the composer of “The Threepenny Opera,” performed last semester by Swarthmore’s production ensemble), states that music should serve a socially useful purpose. In Weill’s case, this refers to the promotion of anti-capitalist/anti-exploitative rhetoric. My take on “Gebrauchsmusik” is broader in scope: since great art helps us make sense of the infinitely complicated mess that is our world and order our winding journey through it, it is one of the most socially useful things out there.
To go further, my own sensibility is clear: music, especially classical music with which I am most familiar, is not abstract. In great pieces, every moment corresponds to a direct physical action taking place commonly and not so commonly in our daily lives. This nonabstract quality begins with the beat, which marches forward in the music the same way we march forward with our own two feet (whether we’re taking a relaxed stroll in the Crum or sprinting up the hill to a class in the Science Center).
Every phrase is an opportunity to provide some calm to our terribly busy, hurried, and chaotic lives. I recognize that not everyone will agree with me on this. People, of course, hear music differently, and my impossible wish is to one day be able to step into the experience of others as they listen to music. I can only offer my own judgment, as I currently understand it.
Adding abstract movement to music, in my view, impedes understanding. Bartók’s Monster was at its strongest when the movement fell from abstraction into concreteness and gave body to the sounds which already tell a story. If the goal of the performance is to allow viewers to form better connections to Bartok’s music, abstract movement moves the production further away from that goal — it is incongruous with Bartok’s story-driven music. While the stories we assign to music are necessarily individual, they should be taken seriously, and visual additions should help to fully realize these stories on stage.
With this in mind, I wish to highlight two highly effective moments from the production. The first was the realization that the giant floating cone, which conspicuously hovered over the stage, was an extension of Bartók’s “real” monster: the phonograph that he used to collect folk melodies from rural Hungary and Transylvania, among other regions. The concreteness of the phonograph was wonderful. When the quartet played Bartók’s transcription of the folk song “Sorrow” right alongside the original recording he made in Hungary, the connection was immediately strengthened between Bartók’s music and the day-to-day experience of rural Hungarians.
There was a moment where the quartet executed a slide in the music, and at the same time, the entire cast of movers turned sinuously towards the speaker (actor Jaime Maseda). This move was extraordinarily effective, as it highlights the way musical gesture is intimately connected to the human body, and motions that occur in our daily lives. Of course, I am not consciously reflecting on these thoughts as I listen to music, but I can feel it in my body when the music tugs on some aspect of living I know well.
In a way, Bartók’s Monster is a microcosm of Bartók’s music itself — a strange, turning, twisting work trying to bend a classical music performance into a theater production, much in the way Bartók bends folk music into the limits of western tonality. Making artistic decisions for “Bartók’s Monster” could not have been easy. Much of the difficulty with the production relates to shifting audience expectations. Some audience members complained that the movement overshadowed the music. Speaking to a member of the quartet, there was an understandable fear of overshadowing the music, and this was combated by both centering the quartet on the stage and having works played in their entirety. In future productions, I would advocate for more robust theatrical elements, so that the focus remains on story.
Here is where the optimism I felt immediately after the show — the excitement at the thought of future productions — becomes tempered. Having worked in both theater productions and chamber music rehearsals, it is safe to say most viewers (including myself) vastly underestimate the time and capital that goes into productions, as it feels out of proportion with the length of the final product. The reality is, a single hour of show is often the result of more than twenty hours of rehearsal. While Bartók’s Monster should be the germination point for a new branch of performance, it is likely we won’t see something like this again for a while, unless we see a shift in societal priorities.
