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Bartok, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality.

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Bartok, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality. By David E. Schneider. (California Studies in 20th-Century Music, 5.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. [xi, 308 p. ISBN-10: 0520245032; ISBN-13: 978-0-520-24503-7. $49.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographical references, index.

Hungarian music historiography is organized around the following assertion: that Bela Bartok, with the encouragement and cooperation of his colleague and friend Zoltan Kodaly, discovered genuine folk music in the isolated recesses of rural Hungary, where the previous generation had allowed itself to be deceived by "misconceptions" and the "pseudo-folksong product of dilettante composers" (Stephen Erdely, "Bartok and Folk Music," The Cambridge Companion to Bartok, ed. Amanda J. Bayley [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001]: 24); and that by rejecting those misconceptions and instead basing his compositions on the newly discovered, more genuine repertoire, Bartok was able to create an "authentic national music" that also captured the spirit of the modern age. As is the case with many historiographical commonplaces, this one misses much of the nuance of the history it purports to summarize. Although publications both scholarly and polemical by Bartok, Kodaly, and other members of their circle sought repeatedly to distance them from what they saw as the pseudo-national Hungarian style of the past, the trained ear detects the unmistakable imprint of that style in many of their works, despite their innovations.

Where Bartok himself, along with his supporters, scoffed at their predecessors' version of Hungarian national music, David Schneider's book, the revision of his dissertation, uses a series of analytical and historical case studies to "highlight and more accurately characterize the stylistic change that emerged from...

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