You are on page 1of 14

2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók (/ be lə bɑ rt k/; Hungarian:  [ be l b rto k];
25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist,
and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important
composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as
Hungary's greatest composers (Gillies 2001). Through his collection and
analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative
musicology, which later became ethnomusicology.

Contents

Biography

Bartók was born in the Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary (since 1920 Sânnicolau Mare,
Romania) on 25 March 1881.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 1/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

Bartók had a diverse ancestry. On his father's side, the Bartók family was a Hungarian lower noble family, originating
from Borsodszirák, Borsod (Móser 2006a, 44). Although his paternal grandmother was a Catholic of Bunjevci origin,
but considered herself Hungarian (Szekernyés 2017). Bartók's father was also named Béla, his mother, Paula (née Voit)
had ethnic German roots, spoke Hungarian fluently (Hooker 2001, 16). She was a native of Turócszentmárton (now
Martin, Slovakia)(Cooper 2015, 6). Paula also had Magyar (Teréz Fegyveres) and Slavic (Polereczky: Magyarized
Slavic) ancestors.

Béla displayed notable musical talent very early in life: according to his mother, he could distinguish between different
dance rhythms that she played on the piano before he learned to speak in complete sentences (Gillies 1990, 6). By the
age of four he was able to play 40 pieces on the piano and his mother began formally teaching him the next year.

Béla was a small and sickly child and suffered from severe eczema until the age of five (Gillies 1990, 5). In 1888, when
he was seven, his father (the director of an agricultural school) died suddenly. His mother then took him and his sister,
Erzsébet, to live in Nagyszőlős (today Vynohradiv, Ukraine) and then to Pozsony (present-day Bratislava, Slovakia).

He gave his first public recital aged 11 in Nagyszőlős, to a warm critical reception (Griffiths 1988,). Among the pieces he
played was his own first composition, written two years previously: a short piece called "The Course of the Danube" (de
Toth 1999). Shortly thereafter László Erkel accepted him as a pupil (Stevens 1964, 8).

From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano under István Thomán, a former
student of Franz Liszt, and composition under János Koessler at the Royal
Academy of Music in Budapest (Anon. 2018). There he met Zoltán Kodály,
who made a strong impression on him and became a lifelong friend and
colleague (Rockwell 1982). In 1903, Bartók wrote his first major orchestral
work, Kossuth, a symphonic poem which honored Lajos Kossuth, hero of
the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (Stevens 2018).

The music of Richard Strauss, whom he met in 1902 at the Budapest


premiere of Also  sprach  Zarathustra, strongly influenced his early work
(Wilhelm 1989, 73). When visiting a holiday resort in the summer of 1904,
Bartók overheard a young nanny, Lidi Dósa from Kibéd in Transylvania,
sing folk songs to the children in her care. This sparked his lifelong
dedication to folk music (Kory 2007).

From 1907, he also began to be influenced by the French composer Claude


Debussy, whose compositions Kodály had brought back from Paris.
Bartók's large-scale orchestral works were still in the style of Johannes
Brahms and Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces
which showed his growing interest in folk music. The first piece to show
clear signs of this new interest is the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor
(1908), which contains folk-like elements (Rodda 1990–2018).

In 1907, Bartók began teaching as a piano professor at the Royal Academy (Anon. 1945). This position freed him from
touring Europe as a pianist and enabled him to work in Hungary. Among his notable students were Fritz Reiner, Sir
Georg Solti, György Sándor, Ernő Balogh, and Lili Kraus. After Bartók moved to the United States, he taught Jack
Beeson and Violet Archer.

In 1908, he and Kodály traveled into the countryside to collect and research old Magyar folk melodies. Their growing
interest in folk music coincided with a contemporary social interest in traditional national culture. They made some
surprising discoveries. Magyar folk music had previously been categorised as Gypsy music. The classic example is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 2/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

Franz Liszt's famous Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano, which he based on popular art songs performed by Romani
bands of the time. In contrast, Bartók and Kodály discovered that the old Magyar folk melodies were based on
pentatonic scales, similar to those in Asian folk traditions, such as those of Central Asia, Anatolia and Siberia.

Bartók and Kodály quickly set about incorporating elements of such Magyar peasant music into their compositions.
They both frequently quoted folk song melodies verbatim and wrote pieces derived entirely from authentic songs. An
example is his two volumes entitled For  Children for solo piano, containing 80 folk tunes to which he wrote
accompaniment. Bartók's style in his art music compositions was a synthesis of folk music, classicism, and modernism.
His melodic and harmonic sense was profoundly influenced by the folk music of Hungary, Romania, and other nations.
He was especially fond of the asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmonies found in Bulgarian music. Most of
his early compositions offer a blend of nationalist and late Romanticism elements.

In 1909, at the age of 28, Bartók married Márta Ziegler (1893–1967), aged 16. Their son, Béla Bartók III, was born on
22 August 1910. After nearly 15 years together, Bartók divorced Márta in June 1923. Two months after his divorce, he
married Ditta Pásztory (1903–1982), a piano student, ten days after proposing to her. She was aged 19, he 42. Their
son, Péter, was born in 1924 (Vetter 2007, 22).

In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, dedicated to Márta. He entered it for a prize by
the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, but they rejected his work as not fit for the stage (Chalmers 1995, 93). In 1917
Bartók revised the score for the 1918 première, and rewrote the ending. Following the 1919 revolution in which he
actively participated, he was pressured by the Horthy regime to remove the name of the librettist Béla Balázs from the
opera (Chalmers 1995, 123), as he was blacklisted and had left the country for Vienna. Bluebeard's Castle received only
one revival, in 1936, before Bartók emigrated. For the remainder of his life, although he was passionately devoted to
Hungary, its people and its culture, he never felt much loyalty to the government or its official establishments.

After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission competition,


Bartók wrote little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on
collecting and arranging folk music. He collected first in the Carpathian
Basin (then the Kingdom of Hungary), where he notated Hungarian,
Slovak, Romanian, and Bulgarian folk music. He also collected in Moldavia,
Wallachia, and (in 1913) Algeria. The outbreak of World War I forced him
to stop the expeditions; and he returned to composing, writing the ballet
The Wooden Prince (1914–16) and the String Quartet No. 2 in (1915–17),
both influenced by Debussy.

Raised as a Catholic, by his early adulthood Bartók had become an atheist.


He later became attracted to Unitarianism and publicly converted to the
Unitarian faith in 1916. Although Bartók was not conventionally religious,
according to his son Béla Bartók III, "he was a nature lover: he always mentioned the miraculous order of nature with
great reverence." As an adult, Béla III later became lay president of the Hungarian Unitarian Church (Hughes 1999–
2007).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 3/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

Bartók wrote another ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin, influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, as well as
Richard Strauss. A modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder, it was started in 1918, but not performed until
1926 because of its sexual content. He next wrote his two violin sonatas (written in 1921 and 1922 respectively), which
are harmonically and structurally some of his most complex pieces.

In 1927–28, Bartók wrote his Third and Fourth String Quartets, after which his compositions demonstrated his mature
style. Notable examples of this period are Music  for  Strings,  Percussion  and  Celesta (1936) and Divertimento for
String Orchestra (1939). The Fifth String Quartet was composed in 1934, and the Sixth String Quartet (his last) in
1939.

In 1936 he travelled to Turkey to collect and study folk music. He worked in collaboration with Turkish composer
Ahmet Adnan Saygun mostly around Adana (Özgentürk 2008; Sipos 2000).

In 1940, as the European political situation worsened after the outbreak of World War II, Bartók was increasingly
tempted to flee Hungary. He was strongly opposed to the Nazis and Hungary's siding with Germany. After the Nazis
came to power in the early 1930s, Bartók refused to give concerts in Germany and broke away from his publisher there.
His anti-fascist political views caused him a great deal of trouble with the establishment in Hungary. Having first sent
his manuscripts out of the country, Bartók reluctantly emigrated to the U.S. with his wife Ditta in October that year.
They settled in New York City after arriving on the night of 29–30 October 1940 via a steamer from Lisbon. After
joining them in 1942, their younger son, Péter Bartók, enlisted in the United States Navy where he served in the Pacific
during the remainder of the war and later settled in Florida where he became a recording and sound engineer. His
elder son, by his first marriage, Béla Bartók III, remained in Hungary and later worked as a railroad official until his
retirement in the early 1980s.

Although he became an American citizen in 1945, shortly before his death (Gagné 2012, 28), Bartók never felt fully at
home in the USA. He initially found it difficult to compose. Although he was well known in America as a pianist,
ethnomusicologist and teacher, he was not well known as a composer. There was little American interest in his music
during his final years. He and his wife Ditta gave some concerts, although demand for them was low. Bartók, who had
made some recordings in Hungary, also recorded for Columbia Records after he came to the US; many of these
recordings (some with Bartók's own spoken introductions) were later issued on LP and CD (Bartók 1994, 1995a, 1995b,
2003, 2007, 2008).

Supported by a research fellowship from Columbia University, for several years, Bartók and Ditta worked on a large
collection of Serbian and Croatian folk songs in Columbia's libraries. Bartók's economic difficulties during his first
years in America were mitigated by publication royalties, teaching and performance tours. While his finances were
always precarious, he did not live and die in poverty as was the common myth. He had enough friends and supporters
to ensure that there was sufficient money and work available for him to live on. Bartók was a proud man and did not
easily accept charity. Despite being short on cash at times, he often refused money that his friends offered him out of
their own pockets. Although he was not a member of the ASCAP, the society paid for any medical care he needed
during his last two years. Bartók reluctantly accepted this (Chalmers 1995, 196–203).

The first symptoms of his health problems began late in 1940, when his right shoulder began to show signs of
stiffening. In 1942, symptoms increased and he started having bouts of fever, but no underlying disease was diagnosed,
in spite of medical examinations. Finally, in April 1944, leukemia was diagnosed, but by this time, little could be done
(Chalmers 1995, 202–07).

As his body slowly failed, Bartók found more creative energy, and he produced a final set of masterpieces, partly thanks
to the violinist Joseph Szigeti and the conductor Fritz Reiner (Reiner had been Bartók's friend and champion since his
days as Bartók's student at the Royal Academy). Bartók's last work might well have been the String Quartet No. 6 but
for Serge Koussevitzky's commission for the Concerto for Orchestra. Koussevitsky's Boston Symphony Orchestra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 4/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

premièred the work in December 1944 to highly positive reviews. The Concerto for Orchestra quickly became Bartók's
most popular work, although he did not live to see its full impact. In 1944, he was also commissioned by Yehudi
Menuhin to write a Sonata for Solo Violin. In 1945, Bartók composed his Piano Concerto No. 3, a graceful and almost
neo-classical work, as a surprise 42nd birthday present for Ditta, but he died just over a month before her birthday,
with the scoring not quite finished. He had also sketched his Viola Concerto, but had barely started the scoring at his
death, leaving completed only the viola part and sketches of the orchestral part.

Béla Bartók died at age 64 in a hospital in New York City from


complications of leukemia (specifically, of secondary polycythemia) on 26
September 1945. His funeral was attended by only ten people. Among them
were his wife Ditta, their son Péter, and his pianist friend György Sándor
(Anon. 2006).

Bartók's body was initially interred in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New


York. During the final year of communist Hungary in the late 1980s, the
Hungarian government, along with his two sons, Béla III and Péter,
requested that his remains be exhumed and transferred back to Budapest
for burial, where Hungary arranged a state funeral for him on 7 July 1988.
He was reinterred at Budapest's Farkasréti Cemetery, next to the remains of Ditta, who died in 1982, the year after his
centenary (Chalmers 1995, 214).

The two unfinished works were later completed by his pupil Tibor Serly. György Sándor was the soloist in the first
performance of the Third Piano Concerto on February 8, 1946. Ditta Pásztory-Bartók later played and recorded it. The
Viola Concerto was revised and published in the 1990s by Bartók's son, Peter (Maurice 2004,); this version may be
closer to what Bartók intended (Chalmers 1995, 210).

Concurrently, Peter Bartók, in association with Argentinian musician Nelson Dellamaggiore, worked to reprint and
revise past editions of the Third Piano Concerto (Somfai 1996).

Statues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 5/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

Music
Bartók's music reflects two trends that dramatically changed the sound of music in the 20th century: the breakdown of
the diatonic system of harmony that had served composers for the previous two hundred years (Griffiths 1978, 7); and
the revival of nationalism as a source for musical inspiration, a trend that began with Mikhail Glinka and Antonín
Dvořák in the last half of the 19th century (Einstein 1947, 332). In his search for new forms of tonality, Bartók turned
to Hungarian folk music, as well as to other folk music of the Carpathian Basin and even of Algeria and Turkey; in so
doing he became influential in that stream of modernism which exploited indigenous music and techniques (Botstein &
[n.d.], §6).

One characteristic style of music is his Night music, which he used mostly in slow movements of multi-movement
ensemble or orchestral compositions in his mature period. It is characterised by "eerie dissonances providing a
backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies" (Schneider 2006, 84). An example is the third movement (Adagio)
of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

His music can be grouped roughly in accordance with the different periods in his life.

The works of Bartók's youth were written in a classical and early romantic style touched with influences of popular and
Gypsy music (Citron 1963,). Between 1890 and 1894 (nine to 13 years of age) he wrote 31 piano pieces with
corresponding opus numbers. Although most of these were simple dance pieces, in these early works Bartók began to
tackle some more advanced forms, as in his ten-part programmatic A  Duna  folyása ("The Course of the Danube",
1890–94), which he played in his first public recital in 1892 (Cooper 2015, 11).

In Catholic grammar school Bartók took to studying the scores of composers "from Bach to Wagner" (Moreux 1974,
18), his compositions then advancing in style and taking on similarities to Schumann and Brahms (Cooper 2015, 14).
Following his matriculation into the Budapest Academy in 1890 he composed very little, though he began to work on
exercises in orchestration and familiarized himself thoroughly with the operas of Wagner (Stevens 1993, 12). In 1902
his creative energies were revitalized by the discovery of the music of Richard Strauss, whose tone poem Also sprach
Zarathustra, according to Bartók, "stimulated the greatest enthusiasm in me; at last I saw the way that lay before me."
Bartók also owned the score to A Hero’s Life, which he transcribed for the piano and committed to memory (Stevens
1993, 15–16).

Under the influence of Strauss, Bartók composed in 1903 Kossuth, a symphonic poem in ten tableaux on the subject of
the 1848 Hungarian war of independence, reflecting the composers growing interest in musical nationalism (Stevens
1993, 17). A year later he renewed his opus numbers with the Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra serving as Opus 1.
Driven by nationalistic fervor and a desire to transcend the influence of prior composers, Bartók began a lifelong
devotion to folk music which was sparked by his overhearing nanny Lidi Dósa's singing of Transylvanian folk songs at a
Hungarian resort in 1904 (Stevens 1993, 22). Bartók began to collect Magyar peasant melodies, later extending to the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 6/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

folk music of other peoples of the Carpathian Basin (Moreux 1974, 60). His compositional output would gradually
prune away romantic elements in favour of an idiom that embodied folk music as intrinsic and essential to its style.
Later in life he would have this to say on the incorporation of folk and art music:

The question is, what are the ways in which peasant music is taken over and becomes transmuted into
modern music? We may, for instance, take over a peasant melody unchanged or only slightly varied,
write an accompaniment to it and possibly some opening and concluding phrases. This kind of work
would show a certain analogy with Bach's treatment of chorales. ... Another method ... is the following:
the composer does not make use of a real peasant melody but invents his own imitation of such melodies.
There is no true difference between this method and the one described above. ... There is yet a third way
... Neither peasant melodies nor imitations of peasant melodies can be found in his music, but it is
pervaded by the atmosphere of peasant music. In this case we may say, he has completely absorbed the
idiom of peasant music which has become his musical mother tongue. (Fisk 1997, 271)

Bartók became first acquainted with Debussy's music in 1907 and regarded his music highly. In an interview in 1939
Bartók said

Debussy's great service to music was to reawaken among all musicians an awareness of harmony and its
possibilities. In that, he was just as important as Beethoven, who revealed to us the possibilities of
progressive form, or as Bach, who showed us the transcendent significance of counterpoint. Now, what I
am always asking myself is this: is it possible to make a synthesis of these three great masters, a living
synthesis that will be valid for our time? (Moreux 1953, 92)

Debussy's influence is present in the Fourteen Bagatelles (1908). These made Ferruccio Busoni exclaim 'At last
something truly new!' (Bartók 1948, 2:83). Until 1911, Bartók composed widely differing works which ranged from
adherence to romantic-style, to folk song arrangements and to his modernist opera Bluebeard's Castle. The negative
reception of his work led him to focus on folk music research after 1911 and abandon composition with the exception of
folk music arrangements (Gillies 1993, 404; Stevens 1964, 47–49).

His pessimistic attitude towards composing was lifted by the stormy and inspiring contact with Klára Gombossy in the
summer of 1915 (Gillies 1993, 405). This interesting episode in Bartók's life remained hidden until it was researched by
Denijs Dille between 1979 and 1989 (Dille 1990, 257–77). Bartók started composing again, including the Suite for
piano opus 14 (1916), and The Miraculous Mandarin (1918) and he completed The Wooden Prince (1917).

Bartók felt the result of World War I as a personal tragedy (Stevens 1993, 3). Many regions he loved were severed from
Hungary: Transylvania, the Banat where he was born, and Pozsony where his mother lived. Additionally, the political
relations between Hungary and the other successor states to the Austro-Hungarian empire prohibited his folk music
research outside of Hungary (Somfai 1996, 18). Bartók also wrote the noteworthy Eight Improvisations on Hungarian
Peasant Songs in 1920, and the sunny Dance Suite in 1923, the year of his second marriage.

In 1926, Bartók needed a significant piece for piano and orchestra with which he could tour in Europe and America. In
the preparation for writing his First Piano Concerto, he wrote his Sonata, Out of Doors, and Nine Little Pieces, all for
solo piano (Gillies 1993, 173). He increasingly found his own voice in his maturity. The style of his last period—named

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 7/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

"Synthesis of East and West" (Gillies 1993, 189)—is hard to define let alone to put under one term. In his mature
period, Bartók wrote relatively few works but most of them are large-scale compositions for large settings. Only his
voice works have programmatic titles and his late works often adhere to classical forms.

Among his most important works are all the six string quartets (1908, 1917, 1927, 1928, 1934, and 1939), the Cantata
Profana (1930, Bartók declared that this was the work he felt and professed to be his most personal "credo" (Szabolcsi
1974, 186), the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) (Gillies 2001), the Concerto for Orchestra (1943) and
the Third Piano Concerto (1945) (Cooper 2015,).

Bartók also made a lasting contribution to the literature for younger students: for his son Péter's music lessons, he
composed Mikrokosmos, a six-volume collection of graded piano pieces (Gillies 2001).

Musical analysis
Paul Wilson lists as the most prominent characteristics of Bartók's music
from late 1920s onwards the influence of the Carpathian basin and
European art music, and his changing attitude toward (and use of) tonality,
but without the use of the traditional harmonic functions associated with
major and minor scales (Wilson 1992, 2–4).

Although Bartók claimed in his writings that his music was always tonal, he
rarely uses the chords or scales of tonality, and so the descriptive resources
of tonal theory are of limited use. George Perle (1955) and Elliott
Antokoletz (1984) focus on alternative methods of signaling tonal centers,
via axes of inversional symmetry. Others view Bartók's axes of symmetry in
terms of atonal analytic protocols. Richard Cohn (1988) argues that
inversional symmetry is often a byproduct of another atonal procedure, the
formation of chords from transpositionally related dyads. Atonal pitch-class
theory also furnishes the resources for exploring polymodal chromaticism,
projected sets, privileged patterns, and large set types used as source sets
such as the equal tempered twelve tone aggregate, octatonic scale (and
alpha chord), the diatonic and heptatonia secunda seven-note scales, and less often
the whole tone scale and the primary pentatonic collection (Wilson 1992, 24–29).

He rarely used the simple aggregate actively to shape musical structure, though
there are notable examples such as the second theme from the first movement of his
Second Violin Concerto, commenting that he "wanted to show Schoenberg that one
can use all twelve tones and still remain tonal" (Gillies 1990, 185). More thoroughly,
in the first eight measures of the last movement of his Second Quartet, all notes
gradually gather with the twelfth (G♭) sounding for the first time on the last beat of
measure 8, marking the end of the first section. The aggregate is partitioned in the
opening of the Third String Quartet with C ♯ –D–D ♯ –E in the accompaniment (strings) while the remaining pitch
classes are used in the melody (violin 1) and more often as 7–35 (diatonic or "white-key" collection) and 5–35
(pentatonic or "black-key" collection) such as in no. 6 of the Eight Improvisations. There, the primary theme is on the
black keys in the left hand, while the right accompanies with triads from the white keys. In measures 50–51 in the third
movement of the Fourth Quartet, the first violin and cello play black-key chords, while the second violin and viola play
stepwise diatonic lines (Wilson 1992, 25). On the other hand, from as early as the Suite for piano, Op. 14 (1914), he
occasionally employed a form of serialism based on compound interval cycles, some of which are maximally
distributed, multi-aggregate cycles (Martins 2006; Gollin 2007).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 8/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

Ernő Lendvai (1971) analyses Bartók's works as being based on two


opposing tonal systems, that of the acoustic scale and the axis system, as
well as using the golden section as a structural principle.

Milton Babbitt, in his 1949 critique of Bartók's string quartets, criticized


Bartók for using tonality and non tonal methods unique to each piece.
Babbitt noted that "Bartók's solution was a specific one, it cannot be
duplicated" (Babbitt 1949, 385). Bartók's use of "two organizational
principles"—tonality for large scale relationships and the piece-specific
method for moment to moment thematic elements—was a problem for
Babbitt, who worried that the "highly attenuated tonality" requires extreme non-harmonic methods to create a feeling
of closure (Babbitt 1949, 377–78).

Catalogues and opus numbers
The cataloguing of Bartók's works is somewhat complex. Bartók assigned opus numbers to his works three times, the
last of these series ending with the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1, Op. 21 in 1921. He ended this practice because of
the difficulty of distinguishing between original works and ethnographic arrangements, and between major and minor
works. Since his death, three attempts—two full and one partial—have been made at cataloguing. The first, and still
most widely used, is András Szőllősy's chronological Sz. numbers, from 1 to 121. Denijs Dille subsequently reorganised
the juvenilia (Sz. 1–25) thematically, as DD numbers 1 to 77. The most recent catalogue is that of László Somfai; this is
a chronological index with works identified by BB numbers 1 to 129, incorporating corrections based on the Béla
Bartók Thematic Catalogue.

On 1 January 2016, his works entered the public domain in the European Union (Anon. 2016).

Discography
Together with his like-minded contemporary Zoltán Kodály, Bartók embarked on an extensive programme of field
research to capture the folk and peasant melodies of Magyar, Slovak and Rumanian language territories (Moreux 1974,
60). At first they would transcribe the melodies by hand, but later they began to use a wax cylinder recording machine
invented by Thomas Edison (Music 2018). Compilations of Bartók's field recordings, interviews, and original piano
playing have been released over the years, largely by the Hungarian record label Hungaroton:

A compilation of field recordings and transcriptions for two violas was also recently released by Tantara Records in
2014 (Fulop et al. 2014).

On 18 March 2016 Decca Classics released Béla Bartók: The Complete Works, the first ever complete compilation of all
of Bartók's compositions, including new recordings of never-before-recorded early piano and vocal works. However,
none of the composer's own performances are included in this 32-disc set (Binder et al. 2016).

Media
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 9/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 10/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 11/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

Further reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 12/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

External links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 13/14
2019/4/24 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Bartók#New_inspiration_and_experimentation_(1916–21) 14/14

You might also like