Béla Bartók
Hungary, 1903–1945
Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist. Synthesis of Central European folk music with academic modernism — forerunner of world music and ethnic integration in rock.
MusicRoots documents 3 artists who influenced Béla Bartók and 7 artists Béla Bartók influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.
Who influenced Béla Bartók?
- Max Reger — Bartok is named among the modernists Reger's dense contrapuntal writing influenced.
- Franz Liszt — Liszt was Bartók's Hungarian predecessor and an early pianistic model in his formation.
- Claude Debussy — 'It was Debussy's music which first showed me the possibility of liberating myself from the tyranny of the major-minor key system.' — Bartók's own words.
Which artists did Béla Bartók influence?
- Henry Cowell — Bartók's integration of folk music into modernism was a key model for Cowell's approach to American vernacular traditions.
- Robert Fripp — The half of the question he spent a career answering: what would Hendrix sound like playing the Bartok string quartets? The cross-picked lines in odd metres are Bartok's rhythmic language on an electric guitar.
- Astor Piazzolla — Bartok was among the modern composers Piazzolla studied in Paris, and the harmonic bite carried straight into nuevo tango.
- György Ligeti — Ligeti's Hungarian years were spent in Bartók's idiom — his early quartet is subtitled 'Métamorphoses nocturnes' in open Bartókian homage.
- Witold Lutosławski — Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra (1954) is openly modelled on Bartók's — the folk-based craftsmanship that founded his mature style.
- King Crimson — Fripp has named Bartók a core model — the string-quartet violence of Larks' Tongues in Aspic descends from him by Fripp's own account.
- Clare Fischer — One of the European composers Fischer absorbed, and audible in the way his chords move.