Béla Bartók's Evolutionary Model of Folk Music

Abstract

AbstractIn his ethnomusicological writings and lectures, Béla Bartók describes folk music as ‘a natural product, just like the various forms of animal and vegetable life’ and elaborates this view, going on to describe a collection of developmental processes modelled explicitly on biological evolution. In this article, I characterize Bartók's evolutionary model by laying bare the taxonomies and genealogies inherent in his classificatory system. Then, through an analysis of the fifth of hisEight Improvisations on Hungarian Folk Songs(1920), I suggest the outlines of a method for interpreting and analysing Bartók's music engendered from this evolutionary model, a method that involves the elaboration of two ideas: (1) a conceptual shift from a relatively historically static major/minor tonality to a multivalent, ‘evolving’ tonality, and (2) the reconception of motives or themes as having no single original forms, but rather as being related genetically, as somehow evolving in their own right.