A Study of Some Bela Bartok's Approaches to Composition, in the field of Hungarian Folk Melodies

The reason why “Bela Bartok” is the topic of this article is his uniqueness in the field of Folk Tunes. Bela Bartok was a very distinctive character in many fields and had one of the strongest pens in the 20th-century music. In addition, He was one of the founders of “Ethnomusicology”. About Bartok’s composition, it can be said that he was seeking a new method to work with folk melodies and did not aim to do as was common. He recovered an individual melody, processed it in its traditional manner, and then applied it into his composition. He also believed that he had a mission to understand the inner spirit of music and to create a new musical style based on the essentially inexpressible spirit. Therefore, in an attempt to gain a new method for composition with the materials of Persian music, I pondered through Bartok’s works, believing that his compositional techniques could be a great example or perhaps a true inspiration for Iranian composers. The major target of this article is to demonstrate Bartok’s approach in deriving some of his compositional techniques from arranging, transcribing and analyzing the folk music. Furthermore, the article goes on to show the deep connection between the themes used in Bartok’s works and his creative musical language. To attain this objective, certain aspects of folk tune’s styles are examined and compared with folk music arrangements and original compositions of Bela Bartok. Firstly with a glimpse into Bartok’s early works in the field of Folk Music, the sources of harmonic structures that have been used in his arrangements are discussed. The role of intervals function in the folk modes, are taken into consideration. Moreover, efforts have been made to show how the outcome of these studies set Bartok free from the tyrannical rule of major and minor keys and led to a new way of using the diatonic scale and eventually a new conception of the chromatic scale, in which every tone came to be considered of having an equal value and a capacity to be used freely and independently. Then the prevalent interval leaps in the peasant melodies and their impressions into moving towards poly-modality and consequently “polymodal chromatism” were examined. Furthermore, I studied Bartok’s vocal and piano arrangements and illustrated the use of “minor-seventh chords”, “quadral” and “quintal” chords, “the circle of fifths” and the “intervallic cells”. Additionally, I worked on the asymmetries, and influences of various folk modes in his works. Then, discussing several examples of Bartok’s works, influences of folk music in gradual formation of his specific musical language were analyzed and studied. Needless to say, this collection does not and cannot embrace all the wondrous aspects of Bartok’s compositional techniques, such as the field of Fibonacci series or Golden Section. Still, my hope is that it would possibly be an appropriate source for further researches and a good collection of his techniques and methods for composition, especially in working with Folk Music.