Composer, folklorist, and performer Béla Bartók (1881–1945) is internationally renowned as one of the most important and influential musicians of the twentieth century. Throughout his life he wrote lectures and essays that dealt with virtually every aspect of East European folk music. Many of those essays, previously scattered in specialist journals in four different languages, are collected here for the first time. All are concerned with that branch of musicology within which Bartók was most influential, and for which he is best known: research into folk music, or ethnomusicology. The volume includes a preface by editor Benjamin Suchoff, a leading expert on Bartók’s music and writings. Suchoff examines Bartók’s developing views on the folk-music traditions of Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and the Arab world.

Le CD d'acc. comprend 182 mélodies et 33 variantes enregistrées par Bartók lors de ses collectes sur le terrain.

The world knows Béla Bartók as a composer. The essays contained in this voluminous compilation disclose a side of the great Hungarian previously known to relatively few persons: Bartók the man of letters. Theorist, performer, collector, scholar, and composer, Béla Bartók is internationally renowned as one of the most important and influential musicians of the twentieth century. Throughout his life he wrote lectures and essays that dealt with virtually every aspect of European music. These essays, previously scattered in specialized journals, deal with the wide range of interests and expertise: folk music and musical folklore, the music of his contemporaries and great predecessors, a brief autobiography, the structure and performance of his own music, the sale of sound recordings, and music education.

This book is a substantial and thorough musicological analysis of Turkish folk music. It reproduces in facsimile Bartók's autograph record of eighty seven vocal and instrumental peasant melodies of the Yürük Tribes, a nomadic people in southern Anatolia. Bartók's introduction includes his annotations of the melodies, texts, and translations and establishes a connection between Old Hungarian and Old Turkish folk music. Begun in 1936 and completed in 1943, the work was Bartók's last major essay. The editor, Dr. Benjamin Suchoff, has provided an historical introduction and a chronology of the various manuscript versions. An afterword by Kurt Reinhard describes recent research in Turkish ethnomusicology and gives a contemporary assessment of Bartók's field work in Turkey. Appendices prepared by the editor include an index of themes compiled by computer. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book is the result of the composer's 1936 visit to Turkey, where he traveled in a number of villages in the vicinity of Adana and collected about 100 songs or instrumental melodies. The author's analytical is now printed as he wrote it. English translations are type set, presents the music, an analyis of the music and song texts.