Béla Bartók

June 15, 2015

Bela Bartok (1881-1945), giant of 20th-century music and founder of comparative musicology, made it his life's work to develop a musical language that expressed Hungarian national identity. Roaming the eastern European countryside with notebook and gramophone, he preserved thousands of folk melodies, many of which he integrated into his own compositions. Cooper (dean, performance, visual arts, & communications, Univ. of Leeds, UK) states that the composer's works are "contingent on the time and place of their composition"; therefore, he presents musical analyses "inline" with descriptions of contemporaneous events. This unusual placing of investigation, which comprises at least half of the text, amid description of historical and life events, is a powerful way of framing Bartok's output contextually. Laypersons may get bogged down as we jump from the outbreak of World War I to the minutiae of Bartok's cadential progressions and back again. VERDICT Kenneth Chalmer's Bela Bartok, or Malcolm Gillies's The Bartok Companion, in which personal experience and score examination are presented separately, might be more suitable choices for the music enthusiast. However, Cooper's dissection, especially of the maestro's three large stage works, are fresh enough that trained musicians and scholars will want to devour this new contribution to Bartok research.--Erin O. Romanyshyn, Frances Morrison Central Lib., Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

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