Bela Bartok An Evening in the Village March 25, 1881 September 26, 1945) Hungariancomposer and pianist. one of the most important composers of the 20th century he andLisztare regarded as Hungary's greatest composers (Gillies 2001). Through his collection and analytical study offolk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later becameethnomusicology.

Bartk's family reflected some of the ethno-cultural diversities of the country

From 1899 to 1903, Bartk studied piano under Istvn Thomn, a former student of Franz Liszt, and composition under Jnos Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest In 1908, he and Kodly 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 Franz Liszt's famous Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano, which he based on popular art songs performed by Romani bands of the time. In contrast, Bartk and Kodly 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. Bartk and Kodly 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. Bartk'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.Compositions[edit]Bartk's music reflects two trends that dramatically changed the sound of music in the 20th century: the breakdown of thediatonicsystem 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 withMikhail GlinkaandAntonn Dvokin the last half of the 19th century (Einstein 1947, 332). In his search for new forms of tonality, Bartk turned to Hungarian folk music, as well as to other folk music of theCarpathian Basinand 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 hisNight 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 movementAdagioof hisMusic for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.His music can be grouped roughly in accordance with the different periods in his life.Youth: Late-Romanticism (18901902)[edit]The works of his youth are of a late-Romantic style. Between 1890 and 1894 (nine to 13 years of age) he wrote 31 pieces with corresponding opus numbers. He started numbering his works anew with "opus 1" in 1894 with his first large scale work, a piano sonata. Up to 1902, Bartk wrote in total 74 works which can be considered in Romantic style. Most of these early compositions are either scored for piano solo or include a piano. Additionally, there is some chamber music for strings.New influences (190311)[edit]Under the influence ofRichard Strauss(among other worksAlso sprach Zarathustra) (Stevens 1993, 1517), Bartk composed in 1903Kossuth, a symphonic poem in ten tableaux. In 1904 followed hisRhapsody for piano and orchestrawhich he numbered opus 1 again, marking it himself as the start of a new era in his music. An even more important occurrence of this year was his overhearing the eighteen-year-old nanny Lidi Dsa fromTransylvaniasing folk songs, sparking Bartk's lifelong dedication to folk music (Stevens 1993, 22). When criticised for not composing his own melodies[citation needed]Bartk pointed out thatMolireandShakespearemostly based their plays on well-known stories too. Regarding the incorporation of folk music into art music he said: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. (Bartk 1931/1976, 34144)Bartk became first acquainted withDebussy's music in 1907 and regarded his music highly. In an interview in 1939 Bartk saidDebussy'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 madeFerruccio Busoniexclaim 'At last something truly new!' (Bartk, 1948, 2:83). Until 1911, Bartk composed widely differing works which ranged from adherence to romantic-style, to folk song arrangements and to his modernist operaBluebeard'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, 4749).New inspiration and experimentation (191621)[edit]His pessimistic attitude towards composing was lifted by the stormy and inspiring contact with Klra Gombossy in the summer of 1915 (Gillies 1993, 405). This interesting episode in Bartk's life remained hidden until it was researched by Denijs Dille between 1979 and 1989 (Dille 1990, 25777). Bartk started composing again, including the Suite for piano opus 14 (1916), andThe Miraculous Mandarin(1918) and he completedThe Wooden Prince(1917).Bartk felt the result of World War I as a personal tragedy (Stevens 1993, 3). Many regions he loved were severed fromHungary:Transylvania, theBanatwhere he was born, andPozsonywhere his mother lived. Additionally, the political relations between Hungary and the other successor states to theAustro-Hungarian empireprohibited his folk music research outside of Hungary (Somfai, 1996, 18). Bartk also wrote the noteworthyEight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songsin 1920, and the sunnyDance Suitein 1923, the year of his second marriage."Synthesis of East and West" (192645)[edit]In 1926, Bartk needed a significant piece for piano and orchestra with which he could tour in Europe and America. In the preparation for writing hisFirst Piano Concerto, he wrote his Sonata,Out of Doors, andNine Little Pieces, all for solo piano (Gillies 1993, 173). He increasingly found his own voice in his maturity. The style of his last periodnamed "Synthesis of East and West" (Gillies 1993, 189)is hard to define let alone to put under one term. In his mature period, Bartk 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 masterworks are all the sixstring quartets(1908, 1917, 1927, 1928, 1934, and 1939), theCantata Profana(1930, Bartk declared that this was the work he felt and professed to be his most personal "credo", Szabolcsi 1974, 186), theMusic for Strings, Percussion and Celesta(1936), theConcerto for Orchestra(1943) and theThird Piano Concerto(1945).Bartk also made a lasting contribution to the literature for younger students: for his son Pter's music lessons, he composedMikrokosmos, a six-volume collection of graded piano pieces.Musical analysis[edit]Paul Wilsonlists as the most prominent characteristics of Bartk's music from late 1920s onwards the influence of theCarpathian basinand European art music, and his changing attitude toward (and use of) tonality, but without the use of the traditionalharmonic functionsassociated with major and minor scales (Wilson 1992, 24).Although Bartk 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 Bartk's axes of symmetry in terms of atonal analytic protocols.Richard Cohn(1988) argues thatinversional symmetryis often a byproduct of another atonal procedure, the formation of chords from transpositionally related dyads. Atonal pitch-class theory also furnishes the resources for exploringpolymodal chromaticism,projected sets,privileged patterns, and large set types used as source sets such as the equal tempered twelve toneaggregate,octatonic scale(andalpha chord), the diatonic andheptatonia secundaseven-note scales, and less often the whole tone scale and the primary pentatonic collection (Wilson 1992, 2429).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 hisSecond Violin Concerto, commenting that he "wanted to showSchoenbergthat 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 hisSecond 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 theThird String Quartetwith CDDE in the accompaniment (strings) while the remaining pitch classes are used in the melody (violin 1) and more often as 735 (diatonic or "white-key" collection) and 535 (pentatonic or "black-key" collection) such as in no. 6 of theEight 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 5051 in the third movement of theFourth 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 ofserialismbased on compound interval cycles, some of which are maximally distributed, multi-aggregate cycles (Martins 2004; Gollin 2007).

Fibonacciintervals (counting in semitones) in Bartk'sSonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, 3rd mov. (1937) (Maconie 2005, 26, 28, citing Lendvai 1972)Play(helpinfo)Ern Lendva(1971) analyses Bartk's works as being based on two opposing tonal systems, that of theacoustic scaleand theaxis system, as well as using thegolden sectionas a structural principle.Milton Babbitt, in his 1949 critique of Bartk's string quartets, criticized Bartk for using tonality and non tonal methods unique to each piece. Babbitt noted that "Bartk's solution was a specific one, it cannot be duplicated" (Babbitt 1949, 385). Bartk's use of "two organizational principles"tonality for large scale relationships and the piece-specific method for moment to moment thematic elementswas a problem for Babbitt, who worried that the "highly attenuated tonality" requires extreme non-harmonic methods to create a feeling of closure (Babbitt 1949, 37778).Catalogues and opus numbers[edit]The cataloguing of Bartk's works is somewhat complex. Bartk 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 attemptstwo full and one partialhave been made at cataloguing. The first, and still most widely used, isAndrs Szllsy's chronological Sz. numbers, from 1 to 121.Denijs Dillesubsequently reorganised the juvenilia (Sz. 125) thematically, as DD numbers 1 to 77. The most recent catalogue is that ofLszl Somfai; this is a chronological index with works identified by BB numbers 1 to 129, incorporating corrections based on the Bla Bartk Thematic Catalogue.[citation needed]

The Ten Easy Piano Pieces, Sz.39, were composed in 1908 and premiered and published the next year. This set, together with the Mikrokosmos and the two books of 'For Children' is an example of Bartok's supreme skill in writing pedagogical music that is easy and accessible yet musically rewarding. The 10 pieces are prefaced with a 'Dedication' which makes use of the 'Steffi Geyer leitmotif', a theme which Bartok also uses in other compositions. Steffi Geyer was a Austrian violinist whom Bartok had been infatuated with as a young man.

Some of these pieces are adaptations of existing Hungarian folk melodies, some are original compositions. It is a tribute to Bartok's genius and his total assimilation of the idiom, that the difference can not be noticed except perhaps in the Dedication. 'Evening in Transylvania' (one of the original themes) and 'Bear Dance' were orchestrated in 1931 and included as part of the orchestral suite 'Hungarian Sketches'.