Bela Bartok
Bela Bartok
Béla Viktor János Bartókwas a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology...
NationalityHungarian
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth25 March 1881
music years echoes
His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.
self creative tone
Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable.
simple maturity wish
With maturity comes the wish to economize - to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.
music absolutely-nothing
I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.