By the end of the nineteenth century, classical music based on ersatz Hungarian folk music had come to a dead end. The extreme nationalism that had swept Hungary, beginning with the failed revolution of 1848, revived interest in the authentic folk culture and inspired the search for authenticity in clothing, food, language, literature and music.

Born in the midst of this revival, Béla Bartók began his musical career in the classical vein, his early compositions emulating Brahms, Richard Strauss and Liszt. But he was swept up in the nationalist movement and, together with his friend Zoltán Kodály, became one of the first modern ethnomusicologists. In 1906 the two began collecting the peasant folk songs of Hungary and Romania, using that newfangled invention, the Edison wax cylinder. Bartók was tireless in his pursuit of authentic melodies and dances, often traveling to the farthest backwaters to record local variants. His research contributed to the understanding of how long poems, such as the Homeric epics, are retained in collective memory over the centuries as part of an oral tradition through the use of verbal and melodic formulae. In later years he extended his collecting to other Eastern European and North African countries, making his final trip to Anatolia in 1936.

The folk music Bartók collected strongly influenced his musical output. He edited and published many of the melodies he had recorded, while others he incorporated into his own compositions. In his original works, such as his concerti or string quartets, he retained the modes, rhythms and style of the folk music, but composed his own themes. 

In the seven Romanian Folk Dances, composed in 1915 as piano pieces and orchestrated in 1917, Bartók directly used folk material from the over 1,100 tunes he had collected from that region alone. He made simple settings of peasant flute and fiddler tunes, letting the unfamiliar modalities and snappy rhythms speak for themselves. 

Listeners familiar with the composer's later transformations of indigenous folk music will note that these Dances are more tuneful, in our Western European sense, than the later ones. The difference is largely due to Bartók's development as a composer; his own personal idiom and musical language affected the way in which he incorporated his own melodies into the folk idiom.

The Dances are short, each characterized by its own instrumentation and characteristic rhythm. The incipits of each define the essence of the entire dance. The last three dances flow into each other without pause. The final Dance serves as a rousing coda.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com