Bela Bartok

Bela Bartok (1881-1945)

Bela Bartok was born in Romania on March 25, 1881. He was a composer and pianist who like to experiment with folk songs that came especially from Hungary. Folk music is music that comes from a particular culture or region in the world. Folk songs are rarely written down to begin with and are passed along from generation to generation through singing and listening.

Bela Bartok spent his early childhood learning the piano from his mother and several other instructors. He began performing his own compositions before he was a teenager and enrolled in the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music.

Bartok is known not only for his composition and performance skills, but also his work in education and ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology is the study of the music of different cultures, especially countries outside of North America and Western Europe. Bartok was interested in folk music and traveled through Hungary with another musician named Zotlan Kodaly to record folk songs.

As a composer, Bartok fused Hungarian folk music with the characteristics of his present time to create his own personal style. Bartok's music was not well known during his lifetime, but became more popular after his death. Today, piano students still learn to play his music. One of his most popular pieces is called Evening in the Village.

In 1940, after World War II had started, Bartok fled from Hungary and moved to the United States. He died in New York in 1945 after battling leukemia.

Barbaro

The piece, Barbaro, was composed by Bartok in 1911 and is one of his most famous piano pieces. Barbaro combines Bartok's style with Hungarian folk music elements. This piece is so popular that musicians from a variety of genres have done their own cover versions.