Hungarian Folk Music: Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók was born in a farming village in Romania in 1881. He had a hard childhood and his father passed away when he was seven. Bartók lived nomadically with his mother, sister and a piano teacher. He attended Budapest Academy of Music with concentration in piano and was eventually appointed to the music faculty in 1907 as an ethnomusicology professor.
Bartók was a Hungarian nationalist and studied Hungarian folk music. While he composed in all genres, he is most known for his interest in folk music. He incorporated it into many of his pieces. Bartók collected, transcribed and anthologized Hungarian folk songs with his friend, Zoltan Kodaly.
Bartók did not believe in the flashy popular art music that had been composed during his time period. He was referring to Liszt’s gypsy music. He believed that "true folk music was the product of the peasant uncorrupted by city life and culture." One of his most famous Hungarian peasant folk songs is "Fekete fod" which means “Black is the Earth.”
While in the New York, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned a piece. This piece was "Concerto for Orchestra" in 1943 which included many pentatonic collections of notes. At the same time that he was composing this piece, he was battling leukemia. This battle was seen in the mood of the piece.
Béla Bartók died of leukemia in 1945. Because of his shy and cold personality, only ten people attended his funeral. He was writing his “Third Piano Concerto” when he died and it was later finished by one of his students.
He is a unique composer because he was the first to develop the Hungarian folk song and stayed true to the Hungarian nationalism while incorporating his own innovative