What Pictures a Child Sees When Listening to Béla Bartók for the First Time
- Mar 8, 2024
- 2 min read
The young girl Maria from the Novella 'I Went For A Walk And Never Came Back' has a secret passion for classical music, and expresses her thoughts on life and death after listening to Bartók:
When I served the one-hundredth cup of tea that day, I thought that was it - I would finally go crackers. But then something spectacularly out of the ordinary happened which put things into perspective. Betty dropped dead over her fried eggs and beans. Postman Paul shrieked like a girl. Mum called the ambulance. Dad let the sausages burn.
After several hours of fussing and gesticulating, I went into the kitchen and found dad frying breakfast combos just like it were any other day. I slammed a ketchup bottle on top of the counter and said, “Isn’t there more to life than this?” He looked at me with his tired old eyes and said nothing.
That night I listened to my records in my room and started thinking about life and death. Since the three musicians left town, I had made quite a collection for myself. I did my research, and found all the recordings with Gwyn Walters - all the piano recordings of that Schubert fella. But on that day, I decided to listen to a really strange one: it was called The Night’s Music - a slow eerie piano composition from a collection called Out of Doors by a guy called Béla Bartók. It was like a clash of spooky notes and lonely tunes which made pictures of nocturnal nature and creepy-crawlies in my head. It was a quiet, fuzzy, twittering and croaking kind of music. I listened to it with the lights off. Just like when you can see your own breath in the cold, you can see your own thoughts in the dark. I imagined Betty under the soil and all these bugs and worms eating away at her corpse, and all the while, above ground, a tranquil lake was shimmering in the moonlight, attracting frogs and dragonflies to spend the evening chirping and buzzing - blissfully ignorant to all the decay and rot below them. Amazing what a little tinkle on some keys can do to your mind! I guess it made me feel better about what happened to Betty that day. It was like music answered my feelings for me.
Gwilym Rees. Copyright ©.
Extracts edited from the novella 'I Went For A Walk And Never Came Back'.
Listen to The Night's Music below:
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