Bela Bartók


Book Description

The definitive account of the life and music of Hungary's greatest twentieth-century composer This deeply researched biography of Béla Bartók (1881-1945) provides a more comprehensive view of the innovative Hungarian musician than ever before. David Cooper traces Bartók's international career as an ardent ethno-musicologist and composer, teacher, and pianist, while also providing a detailed discussion of most of his works. Further, the author explores how Europe's political and cultural tumult affected Bartók's work, travel, and reluctant emigration to the safety of America in his final years. Cooper illuminates Bartók's personal life and relationships, while also expanding what is known about the influence of other musicians--Richard Strauss, Zoltán Kodály, and Yehudi Menuhin, among many others. The author also looks closely at some of the composer's actions and behaviors which may have been manifestations of Asperger syndrome. The book, in short, is a consummate biography of an internationally admired musician.




Bela Bartok and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest


Book Description

Bartók's music is greatly prized by concertgoers, yet we know little about the intellectual milieu that gave rise to his artistry. Bartók is often seen as a lonely genius emerging from a gray background of an "underdeveloped country." Now Judit Frigyesi offers a broader perspective on Bartók's art by grounding it in the social and cultural life of turn-of-the-century Hungary and the intense creativity of its modernist movement. Bartók spent most of his life in Budapest, an exceptional man living in a remarkable milieu. Frigyesi argues that Hungarian modernism in general and Bartók's aesthetic in particular should be understood in terms of a collective search for wholeness in life and art and for a definition of identity in a rapidly changing world. Is it still possible, Bartók's generation of artists asked, to create coherent art in a world that is no longer whole? Bartók and others were preoccupied with this question and developed their aesthetics in response to it. In a discussion of Bartók and of Endre Ady, the most influential Hungarian poet of the time, Frigyesi demonstrates how different branches of art and different personalities responded to the same set of problems, creating oeuvres that appear as reflections of one another. She also examines Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, exploring philosophical and poetic ideas of Hungarian modernism and linking Bartók's stylistic innovations to these concepts.




Bela Bart¢k Studies in Ethnomusicology


Book Description

Composer, folklorist, and performer Béla Bartók (1881–1945) is internationally renowned as one of the most important and influential musicians of the twentieth century. Throughout his life he wrote lectures and essays that dealt with virtually every aspect of East European folk music. Many of those essays, previously scattered in specialist journals in four different languages, are collected here for the first time. All are concerned with that branch of musicology within which Bartók was most influential, and for which he is best known: research into folk music, or ethnomusicology. The volume includes a preface by editor Benjamin Suchoff, a leading expert on Bartók’s music and writings. Suchoff examines Bartók’s developing views on the folk-music traditions of Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and the Arab world.




Bartók and His World


Book Description

Béla Bartók, who died in New York fifty years ago this September, is one of the most frequently performed twentieth-century composers. He is also the subject of a rapidly growing critical and analytical literature. Bartók was born in Hungary and made his home there for all but his last five years, when he resided in the United States. As a result, many aspects of his life and work have been accessible only to readers of Hungarian. The main goal of this volume is to provide English-speaking audiences with new insights into the life and reception of this musician, especially in Hungary. Part I begins with an essay by Leon Botstein that places Bartók in a large historical and cultural context. László Somfai reports on the catalog of Bartók's works that is currently in progress. Peter Laki shows the extremes of the composer's reception in Hungary, while Tibor Tallián surveys the often mixed reviews from the American years. The essays of Carl Leafstedt and Vera Lampert deal with his librettists Béla Balázs and Melchior Lengyel respectively. David Schneider addresses the artistic relationship between Bartók and Stravinsky. Most of the letters and interviews in Part II concern Bartók's travels and emigration as they reflected on his personal life and artistic evolution. Part III presents early critical assessments of Bartók's work as well as literary and poetic responses to his music and personality.




Béla Bartók


Book Description

"With a narrative supported by a substantial number of musical examples and references, Bela Bartok: A Celebration is essential for music teachers and students. Theorists, ethnomusicologists, and musicians will find this an indispensable resource for future research and for understanding Bartok's compositional processes and methodology."--BOOK JACKET.




Béla Bartok


Book Description

Béla Bartók's work set in the context of his homeland Hungary.




Béla Bartók


Book Description

This second edition ofBela Bartok: A Guide to Researchpresents a concisely detailed history of Bartok's musical development, a catalogue of his compositions according to genre (including basic data on Bartok's publishers, achives, library collections, and catalogues), and 1200 annotated primary and secondary sources. A decade of scholarship since the first edition (1988) is included; over forty percent of the material in the second edition is new. Four indexes cover listings by author and title; Bartok's compositions and his editions and transcriptions of earlier keyboard works; proper names; and subjects. Primary sources include: Bartok's own essays, articles, lectures on folk music and art music, letters, and other documents; his folk music collections; facsimilies, reprints, and revisions of his music; and his own editions and transcriptions of earlier keyboard music. Secondary sources include: biographical and historical studies, specialized studies of his personality, philiosophy, andpolitical attitudes; theoretic, analytic, stylistic, and aesthetic studies of his music; discussions of folk music influences and art music influences; studies of his compositional process (based on autograph manuscripts, editions, and his own recordings); discussions of his orientation toward pedagogy; and discussions of insitutional sources for Bartok's research (including archival and bibliographic sources, special issues, festivals, conferences, colloquia, concert programs, and computerized data bases for Bartok analysis and research. This annotated, topically-organizedGuideis the most extensive bibliographical research tool on Bartok. It is the first to draw together the most important primary and secondary bibliographic sources, which cover his varied activities as composer, ethnomusicologist, pianist, pedagogue, linguist, and editor. It is significant not only for those interested in musicological research into Bartok's compositional and scholarly activities but also for those interestedin ethnomusicological research methodology in general, and the study of Eastern European, North African Arab, and Turkish folk music in particular.




Bartók's String Quartets


Book Description

"Béla Bartók's string quartets are 'key works': in them is reflected the stylistic development not only of his own art but of the music of a whole age, the twentieth century, and also of the string quartet genre itself. Each of the six string quartets represents a milestone in Bartók's creative path. They offer a faithful and comprehensive picture of the various periods in the composer's creative development, each bears the characteristic marks of these periods, showing as they do the direction taken by Bartók's orientations, the various influences and his own individual original methods. János Kárpáti's monograph on the one hand sets these works against the background of the whole history of the string quartet as a genre, thus indicating their position as the direct continuation of the late Beethoven quartets, and on the other hand it presents an exposition of the factors involved in Bartók's art, the trace of the influence of art music and folk music, of predecessors and contemporaries--placing Bartók at the head of the twentieth century masters as the distillation and summary of all that preceded him."--Dust jacket.




The Cambridge Companion to Bartók


Book Description

This Companion is an accessible guide to Bartók's music and is an ideal introduction to the composer for students, performers and concert-goers. Part I of the book sets out the cultural, social and political background in Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century, and considers Bartók's interest in and research into folk music. Part II surveys his compositional output in all genres, relating changes in style to broad aesthetic issues, his folk music studies, and his activities as a pianist, music editor and teacher. The final part reveals the wide variety of responses to Bartók's music in Europe and the United States, both during and after his lifetime. It includes a comparison of analytical approaches to his music and an evaluation of performances including those of the composer himself. The book is written by a team of specialists, who represent more recent thinking on the composer and his music.




Bartok Remembered


Book Description

In Bartok Remembered, Malcolm Gillies has brought us closer to this man through a collection of memoirs written by those who knew him best. The volume contains nearly one hundred recollections of Bartok, from his mother s memories of his early years in provincial Hungary, to assorted reminiscences of his last years in New York.