This paper describes an unusually strong relationship between pitch and rhythm in the first movement of Béla Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, composed in 1937. The movement contains four distinct themes, three of which are used in dialogue with the classical sonata tradition. The fourth theme is a nine-note motto from the movement's Lento opening which reappears as an up-tempo ostinato in the development section. Following in the Beethoven tradition, the four themes are strongly individuated in both their tonal characteristics and their rhythmic profiles. Were we to represent the themes on a harmonic map, and, independently, on a rhythmic map, the two maps would be similar enough to be viewed as realizations of a single underlying design.

The idea of intimate pitch-time affinities in Bartók's music is likely to strike many readers as improbable. Such affinities are characteristic of a self-conscious, precompositional approach that flowered only after Bartók's death, an approach associated with the mechanical application of a Platonist imagination to music, rather than a musical imagination per se. This approach is difficult to reconcile with what we know of Bartók's attitudes and methods. His claims that “My entire music … is determined by instinct and sensibility,” and “I have never created new theories in advance, I have always hated such ideas” are well supported by anecdotal evidence, and by the lack of significant documentary evidence to the contrary. Yet Bartók scholars have long intuited correspondences between his treatment of the two domains. Ernö Lendvai suggests that Fibonacci ratios governed Bartók's harmonic as well as durational structures,5 and Janos Kárpáti finds mistuned structures in rhythm as well as pitch. Elliott Antokoletz has noted that expansion of both pitch and durational intervals is a feature of Bartók's developmental technique, and suggests that “organic” pitch transformations in the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion have counterparts in the realm of durations. And, in a recent study of rhythmic conflicts in the Sonata's first movement, Daphne Leong makes several specific suggestions concerning where such parallels might be sought.

Any attempt to explore such intuitions formally must confront the partial incommensurability of the spaces occupied by pitch and time. In the tonal/ metric “common practice,” both pitch and duration are organized into cycles (octaves, measures), oriented to particular points (tonics, downbeats), with the remaining elements (diatonic or chromatic pitch classes, time points or beat classes) dispersed equally around the cycle.