Turkish Folk Music from Asia Minor

by Béla Bartók, Benjamin Suchoff (Editor)

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.

298 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.