Bela Bartok in Timisoara, Romania

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Béla Viktor János Bartók was a renowned Hungarian composer and pianist born in 1881. He is widely regarded as one of the most important composers of the 20th century, alongside other legendary figures such as Franz Liszt. Through his meticulous collection and analytical study of folk music, Bartók played a pivotal role in shaping the field of comparative musicology, which later evolved into ethnomusicology. Bartók's musical legacy is characterized by two groundbreaking trends that revolutionized the sound of music in the 20th century: the dismantling of the diatonic harmony system that had dominated composition for over two hundred years; and the resurgence of nationalism as a source of musical inspiration, a movement initiated by Mikhail Glinka and Antonín Dvořák in the late 19th century (Einstein 1947, 332). In his quest for innovative tonal forms, Bartók drew heavily from Hungarian folk music, as well as other traditional melodies from the Carpathian Basin, Algeria, and Turkey; this bold approach made him a significant influence on modernist streams that leveraged indigenous music and techniques. One distinctive aspect of Bartók's compositional style is his use of nocturnal music, which he predominantly employed in slow movements of multi-movement ensemble or orchestral pieces during his mature period. This hauntingly beautiful genre is characterized by eerie dissonances that provide a somber backdrop for sounds of nature and melancholic melodies. A notable example of this style can be found in the third movement (Adagio) of his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Although Bartók claimed in his writings that his music remained tonal, he infrequently utilized chords or scales associated with traditional tonality, rendering the descriptive tools of tonal theory somewhat limited. George Perle (1955) and Elliott Antokoletz (1984) focused on alternative methods for signaling tonal centers through axes of inversional symmetry, while others viewed Bartók's axes in terms of atonal analytic protocols. Richard Cohn (1988) argued that inversional symmetry often resulted from another atonal procedure, the formation of chords from transpositionally related dyads. Atonal pitch-class theory provided a rich resource for exploring polymodal chromaticism, projected sets, privileged patterns, and large set types used as source sets such as the equal tempered twelve-tone aggregate, octatonic scale (and alpha chord), diatonic and heptatonia secunda seven-note scales, and less frequently, the whole tone scale and primary pentatonic collection.