Bartok is now considered one of the main Hungarian composers and you'll find here a short Bartok biography. Bartok was an avid collector and analyst of folk music, especially of Hungarian, Rumanian and Slovak tradition. He even recorded some village music with the first phonographs available.

Folk music was his love through all his life and inspired his compositional style. Bartok's life before the Viola Concerto From a very early age Bartok showed a musical talent, encouraged by his parents. He was born on 25th March 1881 and at 11, in 1892, he made his first public appearance as a pianist and after some attempts at the composition of some chamber music works, at 18 he entered the Budapest academy of music to study piano and composition. Soon he attracted attention as a pianist. Later he led the life of a travelling performer and began to develop an interest in peasant music and, after hearing a Transylvanian maid singing, he decided to collect the best Hungarian tunes and write piano accompaniment to make them 'art-songs'.

Universal Extractor Download Archive Zip. In 1905 Bartok met Zoltan Kodaly who shared his interest in folk music. They developed a lasting relationship and planned to collect a complete collection of folk songs, seeing the danger that traditional music would otherwise soon be lost.

He did several trips to the Eastern parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, recording and transcribing peasant songs. Other composers in the past had an interest in folk music, transcribed it and used it in their own music. What I find particularly interesting about Bartok's activity in this is that he actually recorded village people singing and playing their own traditional music in their villages, during parties or other occasions. I heard some of these original old recordings of violin music and I recognised some of those tunes used by Bartok in his orchestral folk dances. In folk music Bartok also saw a view to renew his own composition style.

Viola Concerto by Bela Bartok - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free.

In 1909 he started teaching piano at the Budapest Academy, where he remained until 1934. In his compositions Bartok started to integrate more and more folk materials. Folk music was always his love, and he collected and prepared for publication Hungarian, Romanian and also Berber songs from Algeria where he travelled to. He also studied Arabic, Ukrainian and Persian music. This was his main activity for about six years during which Bartok retired from public musical life. This happened from 1912 to the end of the first world war.

As Bartok was unfit for military service he and Kodaly were asked to collected folk songs from the soldiers: the songs were later performed in a patriotic concert in 1918 in Vienna. After the war, Bartok re-started his career as a concert pianist and with violinists, promoting also his own works. Later Bartok visited Italy several times and deepened his knowledge of Italian Baroque composers, transcribing and performing their keyboard works. In 1928 he did his first American concert tour that lasted two months.

At that time he also travelled and performed in the Soviet Union and many European countries. In 1934 Bartok was able to leave the teaching position to work as an ethnomusicologist.

At the Academy of Sciences he could complete what he had planned many years before with Kodaly: a full collection of Hungarian folk music. When the collection was finished it included about 14,000 pieces.