Bartok on Folk Songs and Art Music

Bartok on Folk Songs and Art Music is a great resource for learning about the composer’s unique approach to music. This blog provides an overview of his work and how it has influenced the world of music.

Introduction

Folk songs and art music have always had a close relationship. Folk songs often provide the raw material for composers of art music, and the two genres have influenced each other in many ways.

Bartok was a particularly keen observer of this relationship, and he wrote extensively on the subject. In his essay “Folk Songs and Their Artistic Transformation”, he discusses the ways in which folk songs can be adapted and assimilated into art music. He also shares his thoughts on how to differentiate between the two genres.

Bartok’s observations are just as relevant today as they were when he first made them, and his essay provides a valuable insights into the relationship between folk music and art music.

Bartok’s Life

Bartok was born in Hungary in 1881. He began piano lessons at age five and by age seven was playing the violin. When he was nine years old, his family moved to Budapest, where he continued his musical studies. Bartok later attended the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, where he studied composition with Hans Koessler.

Early Life and Influences

Béla Bartók was born in the small Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós (Groß-Sankt-Nikolaus in German, now Senta, Serbia) in 1881. The easternmost offshoot of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary was a country of many nationalities—Germans, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Romanians, Croats, and others—and Bartók grew up bilingual in Hungarian and German. He took piano lessons as a child but was largely self-taught as a composer. As a teenager he discovered the music of Richard Wagner and Johann Strauss II (the latter’s work he particularly detested), which made a strong impression on him. However, he also became interested in the music of Hungarian and other East European Folk groups. These two disparate threads—art music and folk music—would remain central to Bartók’s compositional vocabulary throughout his life.

Later Life and Career

Béla Bartók moved to the United States in 1940, teaching first at the Cascadesymphony and then at Columbia University. His health began to fail not long after he arrived in the United States and he was diagnosed with leukemia in 1943. He died on September 26, 1945.

During his time in the United States, Bartók continued to collect folk songs. In fact, many of his students were actively involved in this endeavor, as it was one of Bartók’s most passionate interests. He also continued to compose music, although at a much slower pace than during his earlier years. Some of his most notable works from this period include the Concerto for Orchestra (1943) and the Sonata for Solo Violin (1944).

Bartók’s collected folk songs were eventually published posthumously (after his death) in 1951. Many of his other manuscripts were also published posthumously, including a collection of piano pieces entitled Mikrokosmos (1966).

Bartok’s Music

Bartok’s music is based on two foundations, the music of the common people and the music of the cultivated people. Bartok believed that the music of the common people was more honest and pure than the music of the cultured people. He also believed that the music of the common people was the music of the nation.

Folk Songs

Bartok became interested in folk music in the 1890s, when he was studying composition at the Budapest Academy of Music. He collected folk songs from across Hungary, as well as from other parts of Europe and Asia. He published his first collection of Hungarian folk songs in 1905, and continued to collect and publish folk songs throughout his career. Bartok arranged many of these songs for voice and piano, and also used them as the basis for his own compositions.

Bartok was particularly interested in the relationship between folk music and art music. He believed that folk music could be a source of inspiration for composers of art music, and that the two genres could learn from each other. Bartok drew on Hungarian folk music in some of his most famous works, including his Concerto for Orchestra and his opera The Miraculous Mandarin.

Art Music

Bartók’s interest in folk music led him to collect many Magyar, Romanian, Slovakian, and Croatian folk songs. These he transcribed for piano and often orchestrated. The orchestral versions are some of his best-known works, including Romanian Folk Dances (1915), Slovakian Folk Songs (1926), and Croatian Folk Songs (1928). Several of the pieces were later arranged for string quartet.

Bartók’s compositions for the stage include two ballets, The Miraculous Mandarin (1918–19) and Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), and an opera, Bluebeard’s Castle (1918). Of these works, only The Miraculous Mandarin was successfully staged in his lifetime.

In addition to his stage works, Bartók wrote a number of vocal works including choral pieces, solo songs with piano accompaniment, and several art songs with orchestra. His most well-known vocal work is probably the Cantata profana (1930), which is based on Old Hungarian texts.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Bartok’s views on folk music and art music were highly influential and controversial. His ideas shaped the development of both genres of music, and his research has had a lasting impact on musicology. While some of his ideas have been rejected or revised over time, his work remains an important part of the foundation of both folk and art music.