Bartók and Folk Music

The rich traditions of folk and peasant music found in Eastern Europe were a lifelong preoccupation of Bartók. He was greatly aided in this project by the use of the Edison phonograph, which recorded on wax cylinders. Here is a photo of him recording Slovak folksongs. Bartók is fourth from the left:

Bartók's first expedition to collect Hungarian folksongs was in collaboration with Zoltan Kodály and in December 1906 they published a collection of twenty arranged for voice and piano. Here is an excerpt:

Bartók later wrote about the influence of this music in his autobiography:

The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work, because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys. The greater part of the collected treasure, and the more valuable part, was in old ecclesiastical or old Greek modes, or based on more primitive (pentatonic) scales, and the melodies were full of most free and varied rhythmical phrases and changes of tempi... [quoted in Antokoletz, The Music of Béla Bartók, p. 26]

Another example: six Romanian Folk Dances arranged for violin and piano:

 Of course, Bartók both transformed these basic materials and combined them with many other elements such as the church modes on various pitch levels, expanding modes by ordering them into perfect fifth progressions, and using whole tone scales and polymodal chromaticism. We can find examples of these in his 14 Bagatelles of 1908 where he absorbs the folksong influence into original compositions: