Bartók, Kodály, and Ethnomusicology as Creative Source

A Third Way

At the beginning of the twentieth century, avant-garde music in Europe seemed to have two possible paths: the atonal radicalism of Schoenberg, which dissolved tonality to build a new system from scratch, or the neoclassicism that some composers would adopt as an ordered return to the forms of the past. Both options shared one characteristic: they were intellectual responses to a crisis in the language of European art music.

Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály found a third way. And they did so in the most unexpected manner: leaving Budapest with a wax-cylinder phonograph, walking through villages in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and North Africa, and recording the music of peasants who had never set foot in a conservatory and who had spent centuries singing and playing in a tradition completely alien to Western academic music.

What they discovered changed the way they composed. And, along the way, changed forever the discipline we now call ethnomusicology.

The Phonograph as Scientific Tool

Before speaking of the music, one must speak of the method. Bartók and Kodály were not the first to take an interest in folk music: nineteenth-century Romanticism had produced a wave of nationalist composers — Smetana, Dvořák, Grieg, Sibelius — who drew inspiration from the popular melodies of their countries. But there was a fundamental difference between that Romantic use of folklore and what Bartók and Kodály did.

Romantic composers took popular melodies — often second-hand, through printed collections or by ear — and incorporated them into their works with entirely European harmony and orchestration. The melody was folk-derived, but the clothing in which it was presented was academic. It was, to some extent, a drawing-room folklorisation.

Bartók and Kodály went directly to the source. Between 1905 and 1918 they undertook dozens of fieldwork expeditions, first in Hungary and then increasingly further afield. Over his lifetime Bartók collected more than ten thousand oral-tradition melodies from Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Algeria. He transcribed them with unprecedented scientific meticulousness: noting not only the notes but the ornaments, the tempo variations, the performance practices, and the social context in which each song was sung — whether it was for a wedding, for work, for mourning, for children's play.

This fieldwork was, in itself, a methodological revolution. Bartók became one of the founders of modern ethnomusicology: the discipline that studies music not as an abstract text but as a living cultural practice, inseparable from the community that produces it.

What Bartók Found in the Field

What Bartók discovered in those villages produced in him, by his own account, something like a revelation. He had expected to find variants of the Hungarian melodies he already knew — those that had circulated in urban music and in the printed collections of the nineteenth century. Instead, he found something completely different: a musical world that had existed in parallel with the academic tradition for centuries, with its own scales, its own rhythms, its own internal logic.

The scales used in Hungarian and Balkan peasant music were not the major and minor scales of the Western tonal system. They were ancient modes — Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian — the same ones that had dominated European medieval music before the tonal system displaced them in the seventeenth century, and which had survived intact in the oral tradition of the countryside for three centuries more. For Bartók, this was a theoretical revelation of the first order: peasant music was not primitive or underdeveloped; it carried a different, older harmonic sophistication that the academy had forgotten.

The rhythms were equally revealing. Balkan folk music in particular used asymmetrical time signatures — 7/8, 11/8, 5/4 — that did not follow the binary or ternary logic of academic music. A bar of 7/8, for example, can be divided as 3+2+2 or 2+2+3 or 2+3+2, creating an irregular pulse that the body experiences in a completely different way from a waltz or a march. These rhythms were for Bartók a source of rhythmic energy comparable to what Stravinsky had sought in Slavic primitivism, but closer, better documented, more his own.

Bartók the Composer: The Impossible Synthesis

What was truly extraordinary about Bartók was not only that he collected folk music, but what he did with it in his compositional work. He did not quote it directly — he was not a composer who took popular melodies and arranged them — but absorbed it so deeply that his own musical language was transformed from within.

His six String Quartets (written between 1908 and 1939) are considered by many the highest peak of twentieth-century chamber music after Beethoven. There is no recognisable folk melody in them, but they are saturated with the logic of that music: the ancient modes that give Bartók's harmony its unmistakable colour, the asymmetrical rhythms that give his bars a physical tension that European academic music rarely achieved, the percussive piano texture — in Bartók the piano becomes an instrument of percussion as much as melody — derived directly from the way peasants played the cimbalom.

The Concerto for Orchestra (1943), written already in American exile, is perhaps his most accessible and at the same time most perfectly balanced work: a demonstration that the materials of folk music could be integrated into a large-scale symphonic form without losing either their vitality or their rigour. There is a joy in this work that contrasts with the pain of the context in which it was written — Bartók was ill, impoverished, and far from his homeland — and that tension between form and circumstance gives the music a human dimension that is hard to forget.

Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) is perhaps his most perfect work in terms of construction: four movements moving from darkness to light, built with a logic that blends Baroque counterpoint, classical sonata form, and Debussy's whole-tone scale with the modes and rhythms of peasant music. It is a work of synthesis in the deepest sense: it does not mix styles but fuses them into something that did not exist before.

Zoltán Kodály: Music as Education of the People

Zoltán Kodály shared the ethnomusicological project with Bartók — they were companions in fieldwork and research for decades — but his vision of what to do with that material was different.

While Bartók sought synthesis between folklore and compositional avant-garde, Kodály was more interested in something that might seem more modest but proved equally revolutionary: returning music to the people. His conviction was that music education should begin with the music children already carried within them — the songs of their culture, their language, their community — before introducing them to the abstract system of Western notation.

The Kodály method of music education, developed over decades, changed the way music is taught in many countries around the world. Its principles — that the voice is the first instrument, that the ear must precede reading, that one's own folk heritage is the best gateway to music — are today common practice in educational systems across the world. That a Hungarian composer of the early twentieth century influenced how music is taught in schools in Japan, Brazil, or Australia is a testament to the force of that idea.

As a composer, Kodály is known principally for his orchestral suite Háry János (1926) and for the Dances of Galánta (1933): works of unmistakably Hungarian colour, more directly folkloric than Bartók's and more accessible to the non-specialist listener. If Bartók digested folklore until it was unrecognisable as a source but transformative as a language, Kodály kept it closer to the surface, celebrating it with a generosity that needed no intellectual mediation.

Ethnomusicology as Legacy

The fieldwork of Bartók and Kodály had consequences that go beyond their music. They helped establish that the oral musical traditions of peoples were not cultural fossils on the verge of extinction but living systems of musical knowledge as sophisticated as any academic tradition. That idea — which seems obvious today but was radical in 1905 — is the foundation of all contemporary ethnomusicology and of much of what we now call world music.

Bartók died in New York in 1945, poor and almost forgotten, never having been able to return to Hungary. The war that had driven him from his home ended just before he died, and he did not live to see the massive recognition his work would receive in the following decades. Kodály survived until 1967 and was able to watch his educational method spread across the world.

Together they left a lesson that twentieth-century music would tend alternately to forget and remember: that the renewal of musical language need not come only from abstraction and system, but also from encounter with what has always been there, sung by voices no one had thought to listen to.

While Bartók was collecting songs in Balkan villages, Europe was preparing for the greatest catastrophe in its history. The two world wars did not only destroy cities and millions of lives: they also transformed the way composers understood their task, their responsibility, and the place of music in a world capable of such horror. That is the story that comes next.

"Folk music is a natural phenomenon, like stones and plants. That is why it is indestructible." — Béla Bartók

Listening Suggestions

• String Quartet No. 4 — Bartók: the most concentrated and dramatic of the six. An hour of music that redefines what a string quartet can say.
• Concerto for Orchestra — Bartók: the best entry point to Bartók for the uninitiated listener. Vitality, wit, and depth in five movements.
• Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta — Bartók: for those who want to understand the synthesis in its most perfect form. The second movement is of a dark, unforgettable beauty.
• Háry János (orchestral suite) — Kodály: Hungarian folklore distilled into six orchestral tableaux. Accessible, colourful, and deeply Hungarian.
• Romanian Folk Dances — Bartók (orchestral version): six brief dances that show directly how Bartók transformed folk material into concert music.