Music post: Folks who studied folk music

Classical music has been repeatedly enriched by folk music, perhaps because all musics are enhanced by cross-pollenating with other musics. Maybe it's something as simple as being innovative by coming at the same problem everyone else is working on, from a different angle. Maybe it has something to do with the evolutionary process by which folk music winnows out tunes that are not catchy. Croatian folk rhythms can be found in the symphonies of the one-quarter Croatian-ethnic Haydn, while Tchaikovsky put Ukrainian themes into his second symphony and Polish themes into his third. Dvorak's music has a Czech feel, even "From the New World" with its faux-spiritual largo. This weekend on my public radio show, I profile the music of Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, two good friends who made systematic studies of folk music from their native Hungarian environs to Turkey and even northern Africa. Kodaly is remembered mainly for "Hary Janos," a multi-movement tone poem about an old man who tells tall tales. His music is full of character, and often satirical, and he uses a uniquely Hungarian instrument called the cembalom that sounds like a goulash of vibes, cymbals and steel drums. Bartok, who grew up in border towns of modern-day Hungary and Romania, became more cosmopolitan. His ruminating on what made folk tunes so compelling led to a fresh approach to tonal music that encourages different harmonies from those most likely to occur to people with diatonic upbringing. He never lost his love for the ethos of folk music, and had a knack for composing melodies that weren't folk tunes but sounded like they were. In the 5:30 a.m. half hour of the program, all of this comes together in the sequential presentation of the "Intermezzo" from "Hary Janos," the "Interrupted Intermezzo" from Bartok's "Concerto for Orchestra," and the march section of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. Shostakovich's Seventh is his most famous wartime symphony, composed during the Seige of Leningrad and smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm, to be performed in New York to the ovations of Americans who loved Russians because the Russians joined them in opposing Hitler. Today the most striking feature of the symphony seems a bit boorish, an endless march to a folk tune that gets louder and louder, a bully's belligerent "Bolero." Bartok hated it. So when he composed his "Concerto for Orchestra," he quoted it, then quoted the sound of an orchestra laughing, borrowed from his friend Kodaly's "Hary Janos." And finally, he put in a melody of his own, sounding like a folk song but entirely his own, which may be the most hauntingly beautiful theme ever composed for a classical work. "Howard's Day Off," a program of classical music from Howard Dicus's own music collection, airs 5-7 a.m. HST Saturdays on Hawaii Public Radio, including KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku (Maui) and KANO Hilo (Big Island) and streaming on www.hawaiipublicradio.org. Visit Max Cacas's Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook. Dicus has written a Light History of Classical Music which he will present, accompanied by Iggy Jang's string quartet and Ben Gutierrez on keyboards, March 7 at Orvis Auditorium, UH Manoa, and March 14 at the Palace Theatre, Hilo, benefitting the Hawaii Performing Arts Festival.