![]() 5, for example or the first in the group of Bulgarian Dances that ends the long series of progressive piano pieces Mikrokosmos. That curiously limping rhythm runs throughout the scherzo of the Quartet No. ![]() But he was no less fascinated by the fast Bulgarian rhythm which divides the bar into a pattern of unequal units, such as 4+2+3 quavers. His aim to create a brotherhood of peoples was expressed in his orchestral Dance Suite (1923) which makes use not just of Hungarian ‘imaginary’ folk melodies, but also of tunes that are Romanian and Arab in flavour.īartók drew on Hungarian speech-rhythm in many of his works, from the central slow movement in his Fourth String Quartet, to the third movement of the wonderful Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta of 1936. In all, he collected some 10,000 melodies, cataloguing them with scientific meticulousness. Finally, in 1936, he paid a visit to Turkey. Between 19 he visited Transylvania, Romania and Bulgaria and 1913 found him in the Biskra region of North Africa, to the east of the Atlas Mountains, in what is now part of Algeria. His researches soon led him further afield. In 1906 he set out on what was to be the first of many field-trips collecting folk melodies. ![]() The following year, Bartók met his compatriot Zoltán Kodály, who was completing a dissertation on Hungarian folksongs, and his life took a new direction. ‘I shall collect the most beautiful Hungarian folksongs and raise them to the level of art songs by providing them with the best possible piano accompaniments.’ ‘I now have a new plan,’ he told his sister. As a young composer, he fell under the spell of Richard Strauss, and then folksong after hearing a peasant girl singing a Transylvanian tune during a summer visit to Gerlice Puszta, south-eastern Hungary, in 1904. At Dohnányi’s advice, Bartók enrolled at the Budapest Academy of Music. In his early teens, he and his mother moved to Bratislava – or Pozsony, as it then was – where one of his older fellow-students at the Gymnasium (a senior school) was Erno˝ Dohnányi. A composer in search of new ways cannot be led by a better master.’ For Bartók, the ‘right type’ of music was not the sophisticated urban style of the gypsies, which Brahms and Liszt had mistaken for genuine Hungarian folk music, but the less refined traditional melodies that had been passed down through the generations in rural communities.īartók was born on 25 March 1881, in the town of Nagyszentmiklós (which translates as ‘Great St Michael’), now part of Romania. Its expressive power is astonishing, and at the same time it is devoid of all sentimentality and superfluous ornaments. In an article on the influence of peasant music on modern music, Béla Bartók once declared: ‘The right type of peasant music is most varied and perfect in its forms.
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