Lesson 4 · AMEB List D · Twentieth century
Six real village dances, recorded on a wax-cylinder machine over a century ago, turned into piano magic.
Béla Bartók was two people at once: a composer and a scientist of music — an ethnomusicologist who travelled to tiny villages with a recording machine to capture folk songs before they vanished.
1881 born in Nagyszentmiklós (Kingdom of Hungary — today Sânnicolau Mare, Romania!) → pianist and composer in Budapest → 1906 begins collecting folk music with Zoltán Kodály → 1940 leaves Europe to escape fascism → dies in New York, 1945, of leukaemia.
① He was a pioneering ethnomusicologist — he recorded thousands of folk tunes on an Edison phonograph (wax cylinders).
② His catalogue numbers are Sz. (Szőllősy) and BB (Somfai) — his own opus numbers are unreliable.
③ He insisted on a distinction that still causes arguments: village peasant music is not the same thing as the urban popular music played by Roma café bands — see §5.
Kodály (his collecting partner), Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Debussy, Ravel, and the Romanian composer Enescu.
This piece has a secret in its name — a whole chunk of European history.
The set was first published as "Romanian Folk Dances from Hungary" — in Hungarian, Magyarországi népi román táncok (it appears on page 2, not the cover). After the First World War the Treaty of Trianon (1920) transferred the territory to Romania, and Bartók deleted the words "from Hungary", warning his publisher that keeping them would please Hungarians and offend Romanians. The title is a tiny artefact of the redrawing of the map of Europe — a brilliant answer to any "significance of titles" question. (AMEB's own syllabus prints the later Hungarian title, Román népi táncok.)
And here is the detail that makes the title make sense. It is usually said the tunes are Transylvanian. They aren't all — roughly four of the seven come from the Banat and Crișana regions instead. So "Transylvania" would have been simply wrong as a label, while "from Hungary" covered every one of them. The original title wasn't nationalist branding; it was the only geographically accurate thing he could write in 1915. That is a much better answer than the usual one.
All six dances are authentic transcriptions — Bartók collected real villagers playing real tunes on the fiddle and the peasant flute, in named villages across Transylvania, the Banat and Crișana. Six dances, seven tunes, because No. 6 uses two. He even printed the collection places in the score's own footnotes — which is why one of the names below may surprise you.
In a 1931 essay, Bartók listed three ways a composer can use folk music — and examiners love to ask this. The essay is "The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music" (A parasztzene hatása az újabb műzenére), Béla Bartók Essays ed. Suchoff, 340–344.
① "1931" is the Hungarian essay (in the Budapest weekly Új Idők). The English text you will actually quote is a posthumous 1949–50 translation by Eva Hajnal-Kónyi, first printed in Tempo no. 14 — four years after Bartók died. If an examiner asks "1931 what?", that is the answer.
② There is a second Bartók essay with a nearly identical title — "The Influence of Folk Music on the Art Music of Today" (BBE 316–319). The two are routinely confused. Yours is the peasant music / modern music one.
Take the folk melody unchanged and write an accompaniment, "and possibly some opening and concluding phrases." These dances are squarely Way 1. Bartók on this category, in 1931: the accompaniment and framing phrases "are of secondary importance, and they only serve as an ornamental setting for the precious stone: the peasant melody." And in a 1941 Columbia lecture, the same idea in its more famous form: the additions "may only be considered as the mounting of a jewel."
Write a brand-new melody that sounds exactly like a folk tune — indistinguishable from the real thing.
Use no quotation at all, but write music "pervaded by the atmosphere of peasant music" — the idiom so fully absorbed it becomes his "musical mother tongue".
Bartók described this first category twice, with two different images, in two different texts a decade apart. Almost everyone merges them and attributes both to the 1931 essay. Knowing they are separate is the sort of detail that marks a candidate out.
| Text | The image | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 1931 "The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music" | the accompaniment is "an ornamental setting for the precious stone: the peasant melody" | Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Suchoff, 341–42 |
| 1941 "The Relation between Contemporary Hungarian Art Music and Folk Music" — a lecture at Columbia University | "The used folk melody is the most important part of the work. The added accompaniment and eventual preludes and postludes may only be considered as the mounting of a jewel." | Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Suchoff, 351–52 |
So if you want to quote the famous "mounting of a jewel" line — and you should, it is a wonderful sentence — cite the 1941 Columbia lecture, not the 1931 essay. Getting that right is more impressive than the quotation itself.
Bartók harmonised these melodies as simply as he could, so the setting would never swamp the tune. Long stretches are only two parts. It is not a lack of ambition — the string quartets he was writing at the same time are ferociously complex — it is a deliberate choice about how to treat music that belongs to someone else. And he was explicit that the setting must grow out of the tune: its qualities should "be derived from the musical qualities of the melody… so that melody and all additions create the impression of complete unity."
| No. | Dance | Tempo & metre | Tonal centre & mode | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stick Dance (Jocul cu bâtă) | Allegro moderato · 2/4 | A — Dorian → Aeolian, Phrygian cadence | Mezőszabad (Voiniceni), April 1912 — two Roma violinists (prím + kontra) |
| 2 | Sash Dance (Brâul) | Allegro · 2/4 | D Dorian | Egres (Igriș) — peasant flute |
| 3 | In One Spot (Pe loc) | Andante · 2/4 | B — not Aeolian: it has a raised 4th (E♯) as well as the augmented 2nd | Egres (Igriș) — peasant flute |
| 4 | Dance of Bucium (Buciumeana) | Moderato · 3/4 | A Phrygian dominant (♭2 with a major 3rd) | Bistra, December 1910 — not Bucium (see below); Roma violinist |
| 5 | Romanian Polka (Poargă românească) | Allegro · 2/4 ↔ 3/4 | D Lydian (raised 4th, G♯) | Belényes (Beiuș) |
| 6 | Fast Dance (Mărunțel) | Allegro, then Più allegro · 2/4 | First tune centred on D; second tune A Dorian | Two tunes: Belényes + Nyágra (Neagra) |
Buciumeana means "the dance from Bucium", and every programme note in the world therefore says it was collected at Bucium. It wasn't. Bartók collected it at Bistra — and he printed that in the score's own footnote, where anyone could have read it.
⚠️ And a second trap in the same title. You will see Buciumeana translated "Horn Dance", because Romanian bucium is also an alpine horn. That is a false friend — Bucium here is a place name, and the Bartók Archives simply call the piece "Dance of Bucium". If your edition says "Horn Dance", your edition is wrong.
Which is a lovely thing to understand rather than merely correct: the name of a dance and the place you happen to record it are different facts. A dance travels; a collector meets it wherever it has got to. Bartók the scientist recorded the village he was actually standing in, and kept the name the villagers actually used. Say this and you have shown you read the footnotes in your own score — which is precisely what the general knowledge section is for.
The expressive centre of the set. Danced without travelling — the feet stamp in place. The right hand imitates a peasant flute over a sparse drone in the left. Name the augmented second — it is what gives the unmistakable "Middle Eastern" colour, and it is evidence of the region's layered musical history. But don't call the scale Aeolian: it also has a raised 4th (E♯), and that raised 4th plus the augmented 2nd is precisely what makes it sound nothing like a natural minor.
Its defining feature is the irregular alternation of 2/4 and 3/4 — additive, lopsided rhythm taken straight from the peasant original. A 19th-century arranger would have smoothed it into regular bars; Bartók keeps it because the irregularity is the music.
No. 6 is the only movement with two tunes — the first (Belényes) mixes Lydian and Mixolydian, the second, faster (Neagra) is A Dorian, driven by a hammering accompaniment to a fortissimo close. No. 5 runs straight into No. 6 attacca — no gap.
Bartók spent his life insisting that real folk music was the peasants' — not the music of Roma café bands. And then he opened this suite with a tune he collected from two Roma musicians. An examiner who knows the repertoire may well ask about that. Here is how to answer it well.
The Bartók Archives in Budapest publish his collection records online, and two of your six dances carry a performer note:
| Dance | Collected | Performer | Ethnicity of the tune |
|---|---|---|---|
| No. 1 Stick Dance | Mezőszabad / Voiniceni, April 1912 | "two Gypsies", two violins | Romanian |
| No. 4 Dance of Bucium | Bisztra / Bistra, December 1910 | "Gypsy", violin | Romanian |
Look at the shape of that table, because it is the answer. The archive records the tune's ethnicity and the performer's identity in two separate columns — Romanian melody, Roma musician. Those were never the same question. (The other four dances record unmarked peasant informants: a man of about fifty on the furulya at Egres, a young man on violin at Belényes.)
Bartók's target was a repertoire — the urban popular art-song of the cafés — not a people. Roma professionals were simply the normal village instrumentalists across the region: hired for weddings, baptisms and weekend dances, playing for Romanian- and Hungarian-speaking villages alike. If you wanted to record village dance music, you recorded them.
Kodály, 1937: "especially in Transylvania, one can hear from Gypsy musicians a lot of dance music of hitherto unknown origin. Although the people dance to it, they are not used to singing or playing this music. Therefore, the only source of this repertoire is the Gypsy musicians." Not a grudging exception — a recognition that this music existed nowhere else.
Roma professionals played manufactured instruments — violin, clarinet, cimbalom — while peasants played what they made themselves: the flute, the bagpipe, the hurdy-gurdy, the zither. Look back at your table: Nos. 2 and 3 come from a peasant flute, Nos. 1 and 4 from violins. The division is visible in your own piece.
Be careful of the tidy version. Bartók also used "gypsy" as a stylistic pejorative about individual players — praising one violinist as "a praiseworthy exception" who played "considerably less like a gypsy." The substance of his complaint was repertoire-mixing; the language reached for ethnic character. Say "primarily about repertoire and context — though his own language was not free of ethnic characterology", not "not about ethnicity at all."
Those "two violins" at Mezőszabad were not two of the same thing. One was the prím — the lead violin — and the other a three-stringed kontra, a viola-like instrument with a flattened bridge that plays chords rather than a line: the nucleus of the Transylvanian Roma string band.
Mezőszabad in April 1912 was Bartók's first encounter with the kontra — and he was the first person ever to describe it. So the tune that opens your programme's final work was collected on the day a whole instrument entered the scholarly record. When you play the Stick Dance's stamping chordal accompaniment, you are playing something Bartók heard a kontra do for the first time.
Bartók's fullest statement is "Gypsy Music or Hungarian Music?" His thesis: "So-called 'Gypsy music' is not Gypsy music but Hungarian music; it is not old folk music but a fairly recent type of Hungarian popular art music composed, practically without exception, by Hungarians of the upper middle class."
⚠️ It is usually dated 1947, from its appearance in The Musical Quarterly. But Bartók died in 1945 — that printing is posthumous. He wrote it in 1931, in Hungarian, in the journal Ethnographia. And it is not a free-standing manifesto at all: it is a book review, of a German anthology of Hungarian folk songs whose editor had publicly mocked the "modern folklorists" for refusing to count Gypsy-influenced melodies as folk song. Bartók was answering back.
And mark it contested. Modern scholarship does not simply endorse him: Lynn Hooker argues that Bartók and Kodály "branded Hungarian-Gypsy music as 'inauthentic'" and that "the force of their rhetoric… eventually broke the symbolic legitimacy of Hungarian-Gypsy music, relegating it forever after to the 'merely' popular realm." Being able to state his argument and the objection to it is a far stronger answer than either alone.
This music is modal, not major/minor. Bartók found in peasant music a way to escape what he called "the tyranny of the major and minor keys."
Those bare open fifths in the left hand are drones — imitating the bagpipe and the hurdy-gurdy that accompanied village dancing. When the harmony seems to "stop moving", that's the point: it's a drone, not a dead end. Bartók also uses parallel fifths and fourths on purpose, breaking the old voice-leading rules.
Bartók described two folk styles: tempo giusto (strict dance rhythm) and parlando-rubato (free, speech-like). These are dances → tempo giusto governs. Tight and driving, not romanticised. Only the slow No. 3 (and a little No. 4) gets a freer, singing delivery.
The writing is percussive and dry, not singing and pedalled — the piano imitates a fiddle, a flute, a stamping foot. Follow Bartók's accents, staccato and sforzati literally. Minimal pedal (a little colour-pedal in No. 3 to hold the drone without blurring).
The famous 4′03″ is not a stopwatch reading Bartók took: it is the sum of seven per-section timings, and those were added in the 1934 revision, not the 1918 first edition. Metronome marks also differ between editions. So the number tells you his intended briskness, not a target to hit. Most professionals take up to five minutes. The real danger is stretching: these are village dances and they lose their character played grandly. Keep the breaks between dances short.
"My own idea… is the brotherhood of peoples, brotherhood in spite of all wars and conflicts. I try — to the best of my ability — to serve this idea in my music."— Bartók to Octavian Beu, 10 January 1931. Béla Bartók Letters, ed. János Demény (Faber & Faber / Corvina, 1971), no. 152, pp. 199–205; quotation at 200–201.
The letter's dateline reads, literally, "Between Berlin and Budapest, January 10th, 1931." Bartók's most-quoted statement of artistic principle was written somewhere between two countries, in motion — which is either the least or the most appropriate place imaginable for a sentence about the brotherhood of peoples.
① The letter is in German, so every English version you have ever seen is a translation, and they differ. The commonest split is the spelling: Demény's Letters — the volume you would cite — prints "Rumanian", while the Suchoff-derived literature prints "Romanian". If you cite Demény and say "Romanian", you are citing one book and quoting another, and an examiner with the volume on the shelf can catch it. ("Roumanian" is a phantom — it appears in no edition.)
② Who Beu was. A Transylvanian jurist and diplomat who wrote on music — not, as is often said, a radio official. He had given a radio lecture on Bartók's Romanian music on Bucharest radio in November 1930, and was preparing a study. And the context sharpens the quotation: Bartók was not happy with Beu's lecture and wrote objecting to it, correcting his data and pushing his Romanian expositor towards a different reading of him. The brotherhood sentence is not a warm greeting — it is the closing argument in a disagreement.
The context makes this quote powerful: a Hungarian composer, writing to a Romanian scholar, defending his collecting of a neighbouring people's music — at a moment when the two nations were arguing over exactly the territory these tunes came from. Bartók believed the region's folk musics were too intertwined to be split by nationality — a view that annoyed nationalists on both sides. That's the single most interesting thing you can say about this piece.
"These are authentic transcriptions — the first of Bartók's three ways of using folk material, where the tune is kept unaltered and the composer only supplies a setting. He said as much himself in a Liverpool programme note in 1922: the dance tunes are used 'in their original form without alteration.' He collected them on an Edison phonograph in named villages — not all of them Transylvanian, in fact; several are from the Banat and Crișana, which is exactly why the original title read 'from Hungary' rather than 'from Transylvania', and why he dropped those words after Trianon in 1920. And he harmonised them as plainly as he could so the setting never swamps the tune. So in performance I treat the whole set as dance music — tempo giusto, tight and percussive, with the pedal almost entirely out, because a smooth pedalled legato would erase the very style of the piece."
Why did Bartók drop "from Hungary" from the title?
Because after the Treaty of Trianon (1920) the territory became Romanian. Note the detail that makes the original title make sense: not all seven tunes are Transylvanian — about four come from the Banat and Crișana — so "from Hungary" was the only geographically accurate label available in 1915. It wasn't branding; it was precision that Trianon made unusable.
Name the mode of the fifth dance, and its rhythm trick.
D Lydian (raised 4th, G♯), with an irregular alternation of 2/4 and 3/4 taken straight from the peasant original.
Bartók attacked "gypsy music" — so why is your first dance played by two Roma musicians?
Because those were never the same question. His target was a repertoire — urban popular art-song of the cafés, composed mostly by middle-class Hungarians — not a people. Roma professionals were the ordinary village instrumentalists of the region, hired for weddings and dances; if you wanted village dance music you recorded them. Kodály put it plainly: for much Transylvanian dance music "the only source of this repertoire is the Gypsy musicians." The Bartók Archives record it exactly that way — tune ethnicity "Romanian", performer "Gypsy", in two separate fields. But don't over-tidy it: Bartók also used "gypsy" as a stylistic insult about individual players, so say "primarily about repertoire and context, though his own language was not free of ethnic characterology."
Where does the "mounting of a jewel" line come from?
Not the 1931 essay, which everyone says. It is from "The Relation between Contemporary Hungarian Art Music and Folk Music", a 1941 lecture at Columbia University (Béla Bartók Essays, 351–52). The 1931 essay uses a different image for the same idea — the accompaniment as "an ornamental setting for the precious stone: the peasant melody" (341–42). Two images, two texts, ten years apart.
Why is the harmony deliberately so simple?
So the setting would never overwhelm the tune he had collected — a deliberate choice about handling someone else's music, not a lack of skill; the quartets from the same years are ferociously complex. If you quote it, cite it right: "the mounting of a jewel" comes from the 1941 Columbia lecture (Béla Bartók Essays, 351–52), while the 1931 essay's own image is "an ornamental setting for the precious stone: the peasant melody" (341–42). Two images, two texts, ten years apart — naming both is worth more than either quotation.