Béla Bartók

Béla Viktor János Bartók (March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945) was a composer, pianist and collector of East European folk music. Bartók was one of the founders of the field of ethnomusicology, the study of folk music and the music of non-Western cultures.

Reception

Some of Bartok's works have been criticized for their use of tonality and nontonal methods unique to each piece; Milton Babbitt, for example, praises the "identification of the personal exigency with the fundamental musical exigency of the epoch" yet concludes that "Bartok's solution was a specific one, it cannot be duplicated." The problem is Bartok's praised use of "two organizational principles" - tonality for large scale relationships and the piece-specific method for moment to moment thematic elements - worrying that the "highly attenuated tonality" requires extreme non-harmonic methods to create a feeling of closure. Presumably he preferred Arnold Schoenberg's completely non-tonal non-piece specific method of twelve tone music.

Related Topics:
Milton Babbitt - Arnold Schoenberg - Twelve tone music

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