Bartók and ____________ Develop an Interest in the Folk Music of Hungary

Bartók and his contemporaries were interested in the folk music of Hungary. This blog post looks at how they developed this interest and how it influenced their work.

Bartók and ____________ Develop an Interest in the Folk Music of Hungary

Bartók and ____________ Develop an Interest in the Folk Music of Hungary

Bartók’s Early Years

Bartók was born in 1881 in Hungary. He began playing the piano at age five and soon took an interest in the folk music of Hungary. Bartók and his friend, Zoltán Kodály, would often go on field trips to collect folk songs. Bartók collected over 3,000 folk songs during his lifetime.

Bartók’s Family and Childhood

Béla Bartók was born on March 25, 1881 in the small village of Nagyszentmiklós in Hungary. His father, Béla Sr., was a schoolteacher who also gave violin lessons and played the piano. His mother, Paula, was a skilled pianist. Bartók’s parents recognized their son’s musical ability at an early age and encouraged his interest in music.

Bartók began studying the piano when he was seven years old and gave his first public performance when he was nine. He also took up the violin around this time. In 1895, Bartók entered the National School of Music in Budapest where he studied composition with János Koessler and piano with István Thomán, a student of Franz Liszt. Bartók Continues his studies at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest from 1899 to 1903.

Bartók’s Education

Bartók’s musical education began at age seven. His first teachers were his mother and an older woman named Stern Emerence, who Bartók later referred to as his “first, best teacher.” She taught Bartók keyboard, until he was eleven years old. Bartók’s aunt, also a piano teacher, gave him his first lessons in music theory. He later studied the piano with Hungarian virtuoso Henrik Edelsberg. At the National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music in Budapest (now the Franz Liszt Academy), Bartók studied piano with János Koessler and composition with Hans Koessler. His earliest compositions date from this period; they show the influence of Edelsberg and Liszt. Bartók also took an interest in ethnomusicology during his years at the academy; he organized student expeditions to collect and catalog folk songs in Hungary and other parts of eastern Europe. These trips had a profound influence on Bartók’s later work as a composer.

Bartók’s First Experiences with Folk Music

Bartók first encountered folk music in his homeland of Hungary. He was interested in the music of the peasants and often collected folk songs. Bartók also became interested in the music of the Roma people. He was particularly fascinated by the music of the czardas, a type of Hungarian folk dance.

Bartók’s First Collection of Folk Songs

Bartók became interested in folk music during his student years, when he and his friend Zoltán Kodály started collecting folk songs. Bartók’s first collection of folk songs, which he compiled between 1904 and 1906, was published in 1909 as A magyar nép zenegyüjteménye (The Hungarian Collection of Folk Music). This collection contains 1,008 items collected from more than 3,000 performers.

Bartók’s First Folk Music Festival

In the spring of 1906, Bartók attended his first folk music festival. He later recalled that he was “immediately fascinated” by the music he heard there. The following year, he began collecting folk songs from across Hungary. He would eventually collect over 6,000 songs.

Bartók’s Later Years

Bartók’s later years were spent largely in Hungary, where he developed an interest in the folk music of the country. He collected folk songs from all over Hungary and also from other parts of the world. Bartók also wrote a number of works based on Hungarian folk music.

Bartók’s Later Folk Music Collections

In the years following World War I, Bartók and his colleague Zoltán Kodály began to develop an interest in the folk music of Hungary. Bartók collected folk songs from all over the country, transcribing them into staff notation. He also began to collect instrumental folk music, which he would later orchestrate. Bartók’s interest in folk music had a profound effect on his compositional style, as he began to incorporate elements of Hungarian folk music into his own works.

Bartók’s collections of folk music were published in several volumes throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to Hungarian folk songs, the collections included folk songs from other countries, including Romania, Slovakia, and Croatia. Bartók also collected songs from America and Africa. The publication of these collections helped to raise awareness of the beauty and importance of traditional folk music.

Bartók’s Later Folk Music Festivals

Bartók’s later years were devoted to the collecting and studying of folk music. In addition to his work with Viktor Herzfeld, Bartók organized several folk music festivals in Hungary. The first was held in Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania) in August, 1909. There, Bartók and his colleagues collected nearly 500 tunes, many of which were published in the festival’s proceedings. Other important festivals organized by Bartók include the Téka-bál in Várpalota (1911), the Magyar népzene kutatásának ötödik évi jelentése (“Fifth Annual Report of Hungarian Folk Music Research”; 1912), the Himnusz és népzene konferencia Budapesten (“Hymn and Folk Music Conference in Budapest”; 1913), and the Nagybecskerek Folk Music Assembly (1915).

Bartók’s Influence on ____________

Bartók’s influence on ____________ can be seen in their shared interest in the folk music of Hungary. Bartók was one of the first to collect and study Hungarian folk songs, and he often included folk melodies in his own compositions. ____________ was also interested in Hungarian folk music, and they both used similar techniques in their music.

____________’s First Experiences with Folk Music

Bartók’s earliest experiences with folk music came during his childhood in Hungary. His father, Béla Sr., was a skilled violinist who frequently took his young son to rural Hungarian villages to listen to the local music. Bartók also recalled that his father would often sing traditional Hungarian songs to him at bedtime. These exposure to folk music had a profound influence on Bartók’s later work as a composer.

In addition to his father’s influence, Bartók also credited Zoltán Kodály with sparking his interest in folk music. Kodály was a composer and ethnomusicologist who was also interested in collecting and preserving Hungary’s traditional music. In 1905, Bartók and Kodaly founded the Hungarian Folk Music Society, which helped to promote and sustain Hungarian folk music traditions.

____________’s Later Folk Music Collections

Bartók was not the only composer who took an interest in Hungarian folk music. In the early 1900s, a number of other composers and musicologists, including Zoltán Kodály and Béla Vikár, also began to collect and study Hungarian folk songs. Vikár was particularly interested in the music of the Székely people of Transylvania, and he made a number of trips to Transylvania to collect folk songs. Kodály, on the other hand, focused his attention on the music of the Hungarians living in the countryside of Hungary proper.

Both Bartók and Kodály were interested in using folk music as a way to create a distinctly Hungarian musical tradition. In 1906, they founded the Society for Hungarian Folk Song Research (Magyar Népzene Egyesület), which was dedicated to collecting and publishing Hungarian folk songs. Bartók and Kodály also began to use elements of Hungarian folk music in their own compositions. Bartók’s use of Hungarian folk music can be heard in his composition for piano entitled “Evening in Transylvania” (1915), while Kodály’s use of Hungarian folk melodies can be heard in his “Hungarian Rondo” (1908).

The collection and study of Hungarian folk music continued after Bartók’s death in 1945. In addition to continuing to collect and publish Hungarian folk songs, composers such as György Ligeti and Péter Eötvös began to use elements of Hungarian folk music in their own compositions. Ligeti’s opera “Le grand macabre” (1978) contains numerous references to Hungarian folk music, while Eötvös’s opera “Redemption” (2000) is based on a collection of Hegyalja region folksongs compiled by Bartók himself.

____________’s Later Folk Music Festivals

Bartók’s influence on ____________ folk music festivals were evident in the way that these festivals were organized and conducted. Bartók’s methods of collecting and studying folk music were adopted by ____________, who also began to collect and study folk music. ____________’s later folk music festivals featured a wide variety of music from different regions of Hungary, as well as from other countries. The inclusion of music from other countries was an important aspect of these festivals, and it was something that Bartók had also advocated.