"BELA BARTOK AND FOLK SONG" - Bela Bartok, various

Bela Bartok, various
CD cover

Songs

love song, Felsoireg, Transdanubia, 1907
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Links

Bela Bartok and Folk Songs, by G.M. Sifakis
The great Hungarian composer was also a very distinguished ethnomusicologist who devoted fifteen years of his early career, in the first two decades of the 20th century, to collecting folksongs from all the lands (and languages) of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: several thousands of recordings on Edison cylinders and Pathe records, and exemplary transcriptions of them. Until the end of his life in the USA (1945), he never stopped studying, publishing and lecturing about folk music.

This small book offers a selection from Bartok’s writings about the cultural significance of folk-music in the history of music, supplemented by a list of Bartok’s compositions influenced by folk-music, and a CD containing 50 pairs of musical examples consisting of samples of his recordings and how the master adapted or transformed them in his own compositions.