"All of my music […] is guided by instinct and feeling."
The Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century. Around the year 1904, he and his compatriot Zoltán Kodály discovered that what they – like Franz Liszt in his Hungarian Rhapsodies and Johannes Brahms in his Hungarian Dances – had believed to be Hungarian folk music was actually the music of the Roma as it was performed in cities. Bartók travelled throughout Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Transylvania, and the Near East, collecting over 10,000 songs that he and Kodály recorded on phonograph, notated, and transcribed for various instruments. These studies provided new impulses for the musical languages of both composers.
Bartók’s music is characterized by its rhythmic sophistication, brilliant and transparent instrumentation, and individual harmonic language that makes use of diatonic scales outside the major-minor system (for example, the Dorian and Mixolydian modes) and forgoes the “gestures of late Romanticism,” while occasionally including bitonality (when two keys are heard simultaneously) and pentatonicism (five-tone scales). Orchestras and conductors were initially challenged by the asymmetrical rhythms that Bartók borrowed from folk music.

© Peter Kislinger, ORF - Radio Österreich 1