Béla Bartók: Turkish Folk Music From Asia Minor

by Béla Bartók

A report by Bartók, the collector, on folk music found in a small area of Southern Turkey, in the vicinity of Adana in the course of a tour barely two weeks long in 1936. Includes 121 pages of music notation, complete texts of the songs with English translations, analytical essay by Bartók, eight b/w photographs, 24 x 16 cm., total 270 (195 numbered) pages. This is the second edition of the book, revised according to the manuscript. Editorial alterations and additions in the first edition are now eliminated, the song texts are now type set. Explanatory notes by Peter Bartók are added.

331 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

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.