Part of the Ethnomusicology Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Fine Arts Commons, and the Musicology Commons

Internationally renowned musicologist Halsey Stevens said, “In every age there have been great innovators; but every period of musical history has been crowned with the work of composers who brought the practices of their own time into a homogenous and consistent flowering—the highest musical synthesis of the era. Impossible as it is to predict the ultimate verdict, it now seems likely that Bartók was such a composer.”1 Béla Bartók birthed the field of ethnomusicology as an academic discipline through his tireless pursuits of folk music, his revelation of the sound of the rural people, and his incorporation of folk style into his own personal compositions. His work revealed to the world that folk music exists, is important, and that its study stands as an independent academic discipline. I argue that Bartók’s efforts established the field of ethnomusicology because he was one of the first musicians to branch into the study of ethnic music by travelling to collect samples of music, by aurally recording and transcribing fol