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Bella Bartok
This is one of my favorite composer,
powerful with a never-
ending variety of
rhythms and melodies. His Songs For
Children are romantic and more tender
then his composition in the Mikrokosmos.
Both will guide you to understand the
complexity of his masterpieces.
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Béla Bàrtok:"Many
people think it is a comparatively easy task to write a composition on found folk tunes...This way of
thinking
is completely erroneous. To handle folk tunes is one of the most difficult tasks; equally difficult,
if not more so, than to write a
major original composition. If we keep in mind that borrowing a tune means being bound by its individual
peculiarity, we shall
understand one part of the difficulty. Another is created by the special character of folk tune. We
must penetrate it, feel it, and
bring out its sharp contours by the appropriate setting...It must be a work of inspiration just as much
as any other composition."
Béla Bàrtok was a composer
as well as an ethnomusicologist. He studied Hungarian folk songs with Zoltan Kodaly,
which they began recording on a gramophone in 1905. He also worked in the surrounding countries, recording
songs from
Slovakia, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Turkey. Based on his studies, he felt the
Hungarian Dances were not actually from
Hungary.
Bàrtok collected as many as 2700 magyar scores, 3500 magyar-Rumanian scores and hundreds of Turkish and
north African
magyar scores. While studying these, he found an older form of Hungarian music than was previously known to scholars. He
incorporated the folk music into his compositions, creating a new form of Hungarian nationalist music.
In 1923 Bartók married a piano student,
Ditta Pásztory. They had a son, Péter, born in 1924. For Péter's music lessons Bartók
began composing a six-volume collection of graded piano pieces, Mikrokosmos.
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1. Piano Songs
