Talk:Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta

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I have removed the sentence mentioned the Golden Section in regard to the first movement. It was probably based on Ernö Lendvai's publications, but to be honest most of his "discoveries" are hogwash. In this case he claims the first movement has 89 bars (so that with the climax after 55 bars we have the Fibonacci numbers 55 and 89), when in reality it has only 88 bars. So it is a 5/8 section, no more, no less. And that is 62,5%, not "exactly 61%" as the author of this article claims. I wouldn't mind a critical examination of Lendvai as he wrote a lot about this piece. But just mentioning it in once sentence without any further explanation only helps to carry on the myth that Bartok was obsessed with the Golden Section which he most likely wasn't.

---However, Bartok is known to have been interested in the Golden Section and has used it in other compositions. More importantly (and I counted) the climax of the first movement, as defined by the unison E-flats on the second note of measure 56 where the rhythmic accent lies, happens at the EXACT eighth note that is 61.8% of the way through the movement. It's much more likely that that is intentional than that Bartok wasn't obsessed with the Golden Section.

"It is believed that Dmitri Shostakovich parodied this piece in his Symphony No. 13"-- believed by whom? Which movement of that Symphony? The second movement of Symphony #13 has a theme similar to one from a different Bartók piece, specifically the final movement of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (see the Wikipedia page for Shostakovich's #13). Tom239 (talk) 04:36, 6 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I think that whoever wrote that got this piece confused with the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. It doesn't have a reference, and it was written by someone with only one other contribution, so I'm going to remove it. Symphonic Spenguin (talk) 01:28, 25 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I read the Lendvai book some time back in the late seventies and immediately decided myself that it was "hogwash", as you put it. It's not a serous analysis of Bartok and should not be taken for one. The Golden Ratio, by the way, is an irrational number. That means that the best one can hope for, attempting (for some perverse reason) to apply it to musical form, is an approximation. TheScotch (talk) 22:00, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]