Béla Viktor János Bartók was a

Hungarian composer, pianist and

collector of Eastern European and
Middle Eastern folk music. Bartók is
considered one of the greatest
composers of the 20th century. He was
one of the founders of the field of
ethnomusicology, the study and
ethnography of folk music.He also
adopted Hungarian folk themes to
introduce rhythms with changing
meters and heavy syncoption.

In 1904 Kossuth was performed

in Budapest and Manchester; at the
same time Béla Bartók began to make
a career as a pianist, writing a Piano Quintet and two Lisztian virtuoso showpieces
(Rhapsody Op. 1, Scherzo Op. 2). In 1905 he collected more songs and began his
collaboration with Zoltán Kodály: their first arrangements were published in 1906.
Meanwhile his music was beginning to be influenced by this activity and by the
music of Debussy that Z. Kodály had brought back from Paris: both opened the way
to new, modal kinds of harmony and irregular metre. The 1908 Violin Concerto is
still within the symphonic tradition, but the many small piano pieces of this period
show a new, authentically Hungarian Bartók emerging, with the 4ths of Magyar
folksong, the rhythms of peasant dance and the scales he had discovered among
Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak peoples. The arrival of this new voice is
documented in his String Quartet No. 1 (1908).
There followed orchestral pieces and a one-act opera, Bluebeard's Castle,
dedicated to his young wife. For two years (1912-1914) Bartok practically gave up
composition and devoted himself to the collection, arrangement and study of folk
music. He returned to creative activity with the String Quartet No. 2 (1917) and the
fairytale ballet The Wooden Prince, whose production in Budapest in 1917 restored
him to public favour. The next year Bluebeard's Castle was staged and he began a
second ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin, which was not performed until 1926.
He wrote the confident Dance Suite (1923).These exploit the piano as a percussion
instrument, using its resonances as well as its xylophonic hardness. The search for
new sonorities and driving rhythms was continued in the next two string quartets
(1927-1928). The move from inward chromaticism to a glowing major (though
modally tinged) tonality is basic to the Music for Strings, Percussion and
Celesta (1936) and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937).
In 1940 Béla Bartók and his second wife (he had divorced and remarried in
1923) sadly left war-torn Europe to live in New York. They gave concerts and for a
while he had a research grant to work on a collection of Yugoslav folksong, but their
finances were precarious, as increasingly was his health. It seemed that his last
European work the String Quartet No. 6 (1939), might be his pessimistic swansong,
but then came the exuberant Concerto for Orchestra (1943) and the involuted
Sonata for solo violin (1944). Piano Concerto No. 3, written to provide his widow
with an income, was almost finished when he died, a Viola Concerto left in sketch.

“I always said God was against art and I still believe it”

“By the time I had complete my 22nd year I was a new man-an atheist”
 -Bela Bartok

Primitivism is a word that describes the condition or quality that belongs to

something crude and unrefined. When this word primitivism is applied to the arts,
such as the visual arts or music, it can be described as simple ideas juxtaposed with
each other forming new ideas, new images, and new sounds. In music, primitivism
was a reaction to the rich complexity of Romanticism and later on, Impressionism.

In the late 19th century,

composers like Debussy and Griffes were
writing music that focused on obscuring
tonality, rhythm, and harmony,
drastically reducing the use of
counterpoint. The use of both new and
old scales and modes aided
Impressionistic composers in their quest
to obscure the melody and harmony,
leaving only pedal points to identify tonality. Impressionism was moderately
limited in its nature and so it seemed that it was destined to be short lived. During
the last years of Debussy and following his death in 1918 a new genre of music
emerged: what we now call Primitivism.

Primitivism evolved from Impressionism and simultaneously rebelled against

the ideas of Impressionism. Primitivism used many techniques and ideas that the
Impressionistic revolution provided, but unlike Impressionism, the musical ideas
are clear and distinct.3 Primitivism in its purest form is to combine two familiar
or simple ideas together creating new sounds.