Bela Bartok (1881-1945)

I. Ethnic Contexts
A. Collecting ethnic musics
New recording technologies aided the collection and study of the music of traditional
peoples. Rather than changing this music to fit art music, as had been done in the 19th century,
composes used folk elements to create new styles.

B. Bela Bartok (1881-1945)

Spent years combing through remote mountains and villages of Hungary, Romania, and
Eastern Europe, collecting folk tunes, and published some 2000 of them, and wrote five books
and scores of articles on folk music. In his own compositional style, Bartok incorporated the
fundamental elements of folk music as no classical composer ever had before. His personal style
unites folk and art music. His music involves powerful, irregular folk rhythms, melodies based
on old folk-music scales, and unusual - some say “brutal” - folk-music orchestration. His
lifework was to honor the real folk music of Hungary, in part by bringing its harmonies and
rhythms to his own twentieth-century compositions. He was also a pianist and piano teacher,
and his Mikrokosmos (1926-37) is a series of graded piano pieces that encapsulates his style. He
worked in traditional forms, with a distinguished series of string quartets, two violin concertos, a
piano sonata and piano concerto, the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), and Music for Strings,
Percussion, and Celesta 1936).
From the Western tradition he took imitative and fugal techniques, sonata and other
forms, and thematic development; from Eastern Europe he took modal and other scales, irregular
meters, harmonic seconds and fourths, and certain kinds of melodic ornamentation; from both, he
took the concepts of music with a tonal center, phrases, and motive that can be repeated and
varied. He was also intrigued by symmetry, as in mirrors and retrogrades.
Bartok is unquestionably one of the more dissonant composers. He honored dissonance:
Webster defines dissonance this way: “A mingling of discordant sounds...lack of
agreement...congruity.” Of consonance, Webster says: “agreement or congruity....loosely, a
pleasing combination of sounds. ‘Honoring dissonance” became a badge of merit for young
turn-of the century composers tired of a century of Romanticism. Escaping from Romanticism
became the natural thing to do; as we have already discussed, one escape route open to
composers was investigation of nationalist music and the use of unfamiliar scales and rhythms
found in the back country; another was working in more than one key simultaneously, or in no
key at all.
Bartok is sometimes described as part Classicist, part Romantic, and part turn-of the
century modernist - classically trained in the forms he chose, Romantic in his use of orchestral
color, “modern” in his use of primitive rhythms, and ultra-imaginative in scales and harmony.
In 1927 Bartok toured the United States for ten weeks, assisting in performances of his
important works. He was greeted respectfully but not enthusiastically, and the attitude toward
him was similar when he returned to live here 13 years later. The critics agreed that he was the
best Hungarian composer; the music gurus applauded him for his monumental contributions to
musical folklore; and the Bartok groupies argued that he was one of the most original and
forceful musical figures of that generation. But the concertgoers were not set on fire, and his
works were not performed frequently. Bartok spent the last five years of his life in the United
States, dying in 1945, out of work, unfamous, and nearly broke.