Bela Bartok: An Introduction to the Composer and His Music, For Children 42 Pieces Based on Hungarian Folk and Children's Songs

by Béla Bartók, Joseph Banowetz (editor)

This first volume is based on Hungarian folk & children’s songs – 42 pieces. This is a significant volume of piano pieces for the elementary and intermediate level student, purposely written without octave stretches. The melodies of all of the pieces are folk songs or folk dances. This is an urtext – master class edition by Joseph Banowetz. There are 8 pages of notes on the works & Bartok with photographs. There are measure numbers and editorial markings printed in red.

Paperback

Published January 1, 1975

About the author

Works, including the music for the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) and Concerto for Orchestra (1943), of Hungarian pianist and composer Béla Bartók combine east European folk with dissonant harmonies.

Since 1920, small childhood hometown of Béla Viktor János Bartók in the kingdom within Austria constituted Sânnicolau Mare or great Saint Nicholas, Romania.

From his mother, he got his first lessons, but from the age of 18 years in 1899, he studied under a protege of the great late Franz Liszt. At the royal academy in Budapest, he met Zoltán Kodály, lifelong friend. Kodály, Claude Debussy of France, Johannes Brahms, and old Magyar melodies influenced Bartók, who met Richard Strauss in 1902. Indeed, Bartók of founded study of ethnomusicology, a passion in which his friend Kodály joined him, studying and incorporating much country into his own.