Lesson 4 · 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 key distinction: real peasant music ≠ "gypsy band" café music.
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" — because the tunes were collected in Transylvania, which belonged to Hungary in 1915. After the First World War, the Treaty of Trianon (1920) gave Transylvania to Romania — so Bartók quietly deleted the words "from Hungary". He even warned his publisher that keeping them would please Hungarians but 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.
All six dances are authentic transcriptions — Bartók recorded real villagers playing real tunes on the fiddle and the peasant flute, in named villages in Transylvania. He chose seven tunes from his own collection of 1,115 instrumental melodies and arranged them into this suite. (Six dances = seven tunes, because No. 6 uses two.)
In a 1931 essay, Bartók listed three ways a composer can use folk music — and examiners love to ask this.
Take the folk melody unchanged and write an accompaniment. Bartók's image: the folk melody is the jewel, the accompaniment only its mounting — the setting must never overwhelm the stone. These dances are squarely Way 1.
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 deliberately harmonised these melodies as simply as possible, so the setting would never swamp the tune — the jewel and its mounting. Long stretches are only two parts. It's not a lack of ambition (the string quartets he wrote at the same time are ferociously complex) — it's an ethical choice about how to treat someone else's music. Say this and you'll impress.
| 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) — two gypsy violinists |
| 2 | Sash Dance (Brâul) | Allegro · 2/4 | D Dorian | Egres (Igriș) — peasant flute |
| 3 | In One Spot (Pe loc) | Andante · 2/4 | B — Aeolian with an augmented 2nd | Egres (Igriș) — peasant flute |
| 4 | Dance from Bucium (Buciumeana) | Moderato · 3/4 | A — modal | Bucium — violin |
| 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 | A — Lydian/Mixolydian, then A Dorian | Two tunes: Belényes + Nyágra (Neagra) |
The expressive centre of the set. Danced without travelling — the feet stamp in place. The melody uses augmented seconds, giving it an unmistakable Middle Eastern colour; the right hand imitates a peasant flute over a sparse drone in the left. Name the augmented second — it's the evidence of the region's layered musical history.
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.
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).
Bartók wrote 4 minutes 3 seconds for the whole set. Most pros take up to five. The danger is stretching it: these are village dances, and they lose their character if played too 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, letter to the Romanian scholar Octavian Beu, 10 January 1931
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 folk melody is the jewel and the accompaniment only its mounting. He recorded the tunes on an Edison phonograph in named Transylvanian villages, and he harmonised them as simply as possible so the setting never swamps the tune. The title even lost the words 'from Hungary' after the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, because Transylvania became part of Romania. So in performance I treat the whole set as dance music — tempo giusto, tight and percussive, with the pedal kept 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?
The tunes came from Transylvania, part of Hungary in 1915 but part of Romania after the Treaty of Trianon (1920) — so he removed the words to avoid offending Romanians.
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.
Why is the harmony deliberately so simple?
Bartók harmonised the tunes as simply as possible so the setting wouldn't overwhelm them — the "jewel and its mounting". It's an ethical choice, not a lack of skill.