Bela Bartok

he editorial treatment of the second volume of Bela Bart6k's T Rumanian Folk Music is not dissimilar to that applied to Vol. I. The matter of poetic texts here, however, must allow for a sizeable increase in corrigenda and addenda. But first, let us delve into the source material upon which Vol. II is based. THE MANUSCRIPTS The various drafts of Vol. II fall into five basic categories of editorial process: music, texts, notes to the melodies (and texts), preface, and 1 miscellaneous reference material. M usic.-The first draft comprises field recording transcriptions, and notations made on the spot when recording was not possible. Bart6k left behind the bulk of this material when he emigrated to the United States in October, 1940 (The complete poetic text appears together with the music in each transcription).2 The second draft, uncorrected, comprises 304 pages printed by photo 3 offset process from master sheets. The third draft, reproduced from 667 pages of master sheets, is 1 All are contained in the New York Bartok Archives (hereinafter referred to as the BA) in envelopes designated by the author as Nos. 82-83, 85-86, 88, 90-97, 100, 102, and 106-107. See fn. 12 of the editorial Preface to Vol. I for the complete listing of the Rumanian folk' music MS.

Vocal Melodies

Rumanian Folk Music

Béla Bartók

Bartók's classic Hungarian Folk Music, long out of print in English, remains the standard study of a single folk musical culture. This new edition of a major work in ethnomusicology is enriched by Benjamin Suchoff's research on Bartók's notes, analyses, and observations in the New York Archive of Bartók Estate, and the volume contains: —the history of Hungarian ethnomusicology. —a discussion of the Bartók-Kodály relationship. —a comparative overview of Bartokian and other Hungarian approaches to the systematic classification of Hungarian musical folklore, —a review of related literature with emphasis on variant relationships based on data extracted from source materials published as recently as 1979, and —previously unavailable or new data on Bartók's biography, research methods, and approach to musical composition. The volume also includes a tabulation of material, compiled in accordance with Bartók's innovative procedure which first reached the scholarly public in the composer's 4-volume study, Yugoslav Folk Music. A computerized lexico-graphical index of themes is provided. The Bartók texts and the music examples have been enriched by the addition of Zoltán Kodály's annotations. Clarification, where needed, is achieved through the comparative study of Hungarian, German, and English drafts. Previous errata have been eliminated, and symbols have been updated in accordance with Bartokian procedures of the 1940s.

The Hungarian Folk Songs

Maramure? County

This four-volume work is the most substantial and thorough analysis of Yugoslav folk music ever to be published in the English language. In addition to the editorially corrected reprint of the seventy-five Parry Collection transcriptions, first published in 1951, are the 3,449 facsimile reproductions from Bartóks collection of published and unpublished Yugoslav folk song materials. There are, too, instrumental transcriptions from the Parry collection and other sources, hitherto unpublished, and the prodigious Tabulation of Material, amassed from the data inherent in the source melodies, which appears in Vol. II also in facsimile form. Of equal importance is the reprint in Vol. I of the authors index of Serbo-Croatian refrains, which he originally placed in the third volume (Texts) of Rumanian Folk Music for comparative purposes. The editor, Dr. Benjamin Suchoff, provides introductory narratives in which the historical aspect and the chronology of the various manuscript versions are treated. With the assistance of the foremost present-day Yugoslav ethnomusicologists, he has added detailed chapters on related materials that supplement and update Bartóks findings in Yugoslav Folk Music. Dr. Suchoff has also constructed various tabulations, in accordance with Bartókian procedure followed elsewhere, as an aid to the reader. Of special interest will be the computer-derived lexicographical index of themes in Vol. II, which he prepared by extracting the incipits from more than 8,000 melody sections of different content-structure.

The Restructuring of Moral Theory

Yugoslav Folk Music

N January 30, 1944, Bela Bart6k, writing from Asheville, North O Carolina, where he had gone to regain his strength after a long period of ill-health in 1943, commented, Here I have started on a very interesting (and, as usual, lengthy) work, the kind I have never done before. Properly speaking, it is not a musical work: I am arranging and writing out fair copies of Rumanian folksong texts'! Although the date has not as yet been established, the first draft of the Rumanian folk texts as texts per se was written-if an apparent age of the MS. can be considered a clue-sometime before Bartok had emigrated to the United States in 1940. This draft (see description below) had been forwarded for etymological data, according to the non-Bart6kian autography appearing thereon. The identity of the informant or informants involved and the circumstances surrounding this matter remain unknown at the present writing. After Bart6k had made offset prints of the music examples of the 2 first two volumes of Rumanian F olk Music in 1940, the printed but incomplete draft of Vol. II (Vocal Melodies)-comprising 304 of the ultimate total of 659 pages-was sent to Nicholas Vama~escu, then di rector of "The Romanian Radio Hour" (Station W. ]. L. B. , Detroit, 3 Michigan), for correction of the texts, in April, 1941. 1 Letter to Joseph Szigeti, in Bartok Bela levelei (ed. Janos Demeny; Budapest: Miivelt Nep Konyvkiado, 1951), p. 184.

Texts

n several of his writings on folk music Bela Bart6k recalls an incident I that happened to him in 1904 during a visit to a small village in Tran 1 syl vania. Quite by chance he heard there an eighteen-year-old Hun garian peasant girl singing Hungarian folk songs whose construction was 2 significantly different from the songs he had known until then. This experience appealed to his imagination far deeper than chance oc currences usually do. It sparked in him a creative fire that was there after to impart to his music certain characteristics that are recognizable today as indigenous to the Bart6kian style of composition. The inspirational value of the incident was rekindled by return trips to Transylvania. During these trips he was not merely listening. He began notating, melodies, building them into a coordinated collection. Soon Bart6k's itinerary took him into villages populated in checkered proximity by both Hungarians and Rumanians, thence into little communities where the population was exclusively Rumanian. There he discovered that their songs were much less, if at all, influenced by the urban civilization of Western Europe than those he had collected in Hungarian villages. In an interview he gave to a Transylvanian newspaper in 1922, Bart6k described the difference between the available Hungarian and Rumanian songs.

Instrumental Melodies

n the first volume of Rumanian Folk Music (Instrumental Melodies) I portions of Bela Bart6k's subsequently-discarded preface, concern ing the fate of his folklore publications, are presented in explanation of the editorial processes necessary for achieving the publication. 1 By way of introduction to this revised edition of a previous, although in complete, published version of the Rumanian Carols and Christmas Songs (Colinde), we refer again to the author's suppressed lines which pertain to this volume: The second publication by the same publisher was to include my collection of Rumanian Colindas (Winter-solstice songs). Their extremely interesting texts were supposed to appear in original as well as in English. After several years of delay, the translation to English prose was completed, one part in adequate archaic English, the rest (by someone else) in most unsuitable Kitchen-English. The publisher did not wish to change this, though. Result: I published the book at my own expense; however, only the musical part, because of lack of sufficient funds. The texts are still in manuscript, even today. 2 Our primary aim, therefore, has been to unite the Rumanian poetic texts and translations with the musical part, in one volume, as was the desire of the author.

Carols and Christmas Songs (Colinde)

This book is a substantial and thorough musicological analysis of Turkish folk music. It reproduces in facsimile Bartók's autograph record of eighty seven vocal and instrumental peasant melodies of the Yürük Tribes, a nomadic people in southern Anatolia. Bartók's introduction includes his annotations of the melodies, texts, and translations and establishes a connection between Old Hungarian and Old Turkish folk music. Begun in 1936 and completed in 1943, the work was Bartók's last major essay. The editor, Dr. Benjamin Suchoff, has provided an historical introduction and a chronology of the various manuscript versions. An afterword by Kurt Reinhard describes recent research in Turkish ethnomusicology and gives a contemporary assessment of Bartók's field work in Turkey. Appendices prepared by the editor include an index of themes compiled by computer. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Bela Bartok

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