FIFTH STRING MEMBERS BLOG: Who’s Jimi Hendrix?
I used to find working with teenagers quite terrifying but our work with Footscray High School (FHS) has completely changed my outlook. They are polite, engaged and interested students who are genuinely curious about who we are and what we do.
Supported by the Betty Amsden Foundation and our Fifth String donor program, our project in 2021 has been to introduce FHS to Bartok; his groundbreaking work with Eastern European folk tunes and his move to the USA to escape the rise of the Nazis in World War II. We began by playing snippets of the first movement of Bartok’s 5th string quartet to year 7 art students, alternating between playing while they responded to the music, chatting with them about their responses, and listening to them discuss what they were hearing. It was as much a learning curve for us as it was for them. Their initial response was:
“Wow - it sounds so angry!”
“I can really hear World War II”
“He sounds really violent”
Bartok was anything but violent - a pacifist in fact! We had been working in our rehearsals on creating rounder sounds and focussing on the folk, peasant-like qualities in the music and actively avoiding angry sounds. So it was a real shock to hear their unfiltered opinions about the music and how we were playing it. We took their responses to heart and immediately began discussing how we could more successfully impart the way we wanted Bartok to be heard, modifying our articulation and searching more keenly for the easiness, humour and fun as well as the beauty that can be found in his music.
The year 7 art class at Footscray High School has played a part in the continuum of Bartok interpretation, and we think that’s pretty cool.
An interesting fact about Bartok is the number of non “classical” musicians he has influenced. Jimi Hendrix in particular is often brought up in discussions as a musician who was heavily influenced by Bartok’s approach to harmony and the sounds he was creating. Another surprise of our time with the year 7s was when we excitedly told them about how much Jimi Hendrix loved Bartok and how we were working with the school band on a piece combining “Purple Haze” and Bartok. After looking at the confused faces, I asked, “Have you heard of Jimi Hendrix?” Every single student shook their heads and it was an immense privilege to be the ones to introduce these students to one of the greatest guitarists that ever lived.
Another element of the FHS residency is the production of promotional posters for the concert by Visual Communication Students.
They took various elements from the music - like the swirling nature of the melodies as opposed to the jagged lines of the rhythm - and created some very impressive displays of design fusion. We were particularly taken by the references to an Art Deco design aesthetic, representative of the time in which Bela Bartok lived. It was the first time they had worked to a specific design brief and we think their end products were extraordinary.
The mashup of Bartok and Jimi Hendrix has been one of the highlights of our time at FHS. We identified past Composer Development Program participant, Lee Bradshaw as the perfect composer to fuse “Purple Haze” with Bartok’s 5th string quartet (first movement) and it has been quite exciting to work with the students on melding acoustic and electric sounds, and incorporating all the elements of chamber music such as sound production, unanimity of intent, listening, and ensemble work. It is a piece that will definitely be one to keep in our repertoire and we will be introducing it to our string quartet friends. We will do everything in our power to share a recording of this with you by the end of the year. It’s just too much fun seeing these rockers respond to Bartok in this way.
We have currently postponed our work at Footscray High School until November and will look forward to sharing the next chapter with you. We can’t wait to see what the senior art students deliver when we challenge them to create a large scale work on the floor to the sounds of Bartok.