That's the music Written by Béla Bartók. Let's learn how to play it
Béla Bartók was a [twentieth-century] composer with whom many jazz musicians myself included found great affinity who not [only] was an extremely meticulous
Composer that embraced Modernist harmony and melody, but he wrote some really
rhythmically driven music
Bartók often borrowed folk melodies and elements from folk Dances from his native Hungary which kind of infuses a lot of his music with this
really rhythmic drive That's kind of irresistible. To show you what I mean, let's check out the fifth movement from his fourth string quartet
So that was basically metal.
And it was written about a hundred years ago
Bartók string quartets in
particular like the one that we just listened to provide a very fertile ground for study for us bass players because even though they're very
harmonically and melodically dense. They're still very foundationally rhythmic in a very logical and musical way. Today
we're going to take a look at an excerpt from the third movement from his first string quartet which was written in 1909
So even after a century it still feels very modern and fresh and actually before we do that fun fact Bela fleck of Baylor fleck
And the Flecktones was named after Béla Bartók also that annoying bat character from the movie, Anastasia
So whenever I like to play string quartet music on bass
I like to play the cello part because the cello is the bass voice of a string quartet
[this] is a bass guitar, [and] it's the exact same thing
But it's got a plan like this you tip it on the side cello
You've got a bass string quartet has two violins one Viola and one cello and bass guitar
Sounds an octave lower than cello
It's a transposing instrument at the octave
So what that means whenever we play the cello part?
Everything is going to sound down an octave as a few things to keep in mind though with the cello
You actually have the note low C. Which the electric bass doesn't have unless you happen to have a five string
You just have a four string bass
You're going to very often have to transpose notes up the octave to the cellos register in this particular passage
I'm playing the b in the b flat and the bass register an octave lower
Below the cello and then the C and the C sharp in the cellos register up an octave
Classical double bass players very often have something called a C extension which helps them to get those really really low notes down an octave
From a cello like bad note, but down an octave
So the very first thing [that] you see when you're taking a look at the cello part [-] the third movement of the first bartok
String quartet is this thing which is a tenor clef?
It's a moveable see Clef where middle C
Lies on the line in between the little two curlicue things now. Why would you even have a tenor clef?
Why not just write it in bass clef, Er?
God-Forbid Treble clef well it used to be considered very difficult to read Ledger [lines]
What composers did is they took moveable sea cliffs and made it so [that] whatever part you were playing would Lie upon the five lines
Of normal staff there used to be a total of five
Moveable sea clubs you had this piano clef the Mezzo Soprano clef the Alto clef the tenor clef and the Baritone clef all
Corresponding with different vocal ranges now it is there's really only two which are ever used
There's the alto Clef which is kind of the default clef for Viola players
And then there's the tenor clef which sometimes classical double bass players and chellis & Bassoonists and trum
Trombone or from bonus yes have to use
It's kind of a pain because it's a little archaic
But you will see it occasionally a good trick for reading tenor clef is pretending that it's bass clef and then
transposing everything up a perfect fifth
[for] example the very first two notes of the third movement from the first string quartet and the cello part are b and B flat?
But it looks like it's e and e flat if you pretend it's bass clef moving on from this tenor Clef nonsense a very fun
thing that we get to do in bartok string music is something called the Bartok and
[Cecotto] now normally classical Musicians play pizzicato with sort of a little bit of a demure plug for most circumstances and bartok wanted something a
Lot more aggressive than that, so [he] [had] [a] string players take the string and sort of reel off of the fingerboard
Completely similar in fact it's exactly the same as our pop as in like our slap or pop as electric bass players now normally bartok
Pizza Kado is written like this but very often when interpreting the bartok string quartets
Sometimes classical players might sort of throw in the pizza kado in more aggressive pizza kado sections even if it's not explicitly written
So that's kind of what I did here when I did some binding
on the Pizza [Kado] section
Now this is a little bit of an interesting notation here this means that you're going to be playing eighth notes
And it's kind of a music copyist shorthand
So they don't actually have to write all the eighth notes out in this measure, but also visually. It's kind of nice
you don't have quite as much information to soak in all you need to know is play eighth notes for this whole measure now when
You're playing this music or any sort of string quartet music
It's really important to listen to recordings and one thing that you're going to notice when you're listening to the recordings
Is that string players in classical situations very often have a different [understanding] of rhythm than what you might have as a bass player?
We generally want to strive for very metronomic even rhythm because we want to sort of lock in with a drummer who also?
Hopefully fingers crossed also has metronomic even rhythm with string players in classical situations however
there's a little bit more a band flow to the time for example when you're getting louder you're going to get faster than when you're
Getting softer you're going to get slower different ensembles
And different recordings have different
Variations of this idea the one I'm using from this particular video is from the Belle chasse string quartet
And I really like their particular rhythmic concept and I've learned a lot from it anyway
Here's my [interpretation] of the first minute and a half or so of the third movement from the bartok [for] string quartet
[I] really wanted to emulate the aggressive bowing the scratchy bowing [of] the [belgic] quartet
They really like to dig in so I thought well
How do metal bass players play?
Brian Biller talks about something he calls the chime
And that's something that I think about a lot where you're kind of going through the string with your index finger
[and] you're not really getting the meat so much as you sort of attacking kind of almost like a right hand slap with your index
Finger so let me Sort of show you
That's the sort of tone production that I was thinking about because if I was going [for] that
Sort of burpee typical jazz mid-range II sort of sound it would not have blended very well with the rest of the strings anyway
I hope you enjoy
[you]
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