Béla Bartók's Eight Hungarian folk songs for voice and piano: vocal style as elaborated by harmonic, melodic, and text factors

Bartók’s early research into Hungarian folk music led him to his first folk-song arrangements for voice and piano in 1906 and 1907. Although these song settings in the first ten of the Twenty Hungarian Folksongs (1906) and the Eight Hungarian Folk Songs (1907-1917) are contrasted by later developments, in which the accompaniment becomes more important than the voice part, we can still see the originality of the composer emerging in his vocal transcriptions and in the relation between piano and voice. The intention of this study is to explore the authentic folk characteristics of the Hungarian tunes, and to show how Bartók is already beginning to draw these melodic structures into his own original style. One important aspect of the study is to show how the basic pentatonic scale is elaborated differently in each of the songs, that is, by modal and polymodal expansion. Yet, all of the individual tunes show an overall stylistic “unity within diversity,” a principle that represents what may be considered the Bartók signature. All of the vocal parameters—interval structure, modality, rhythmic style, syllabic structure, linear formal structure, melodic contour, range, and cadential caesuras—will be explored as a means of defining the individual style of each tune as well as the more general style of the vocal idiom in these early Bartók settings. How can an authentic folk tune reveal Bartók’s personal style? The answer seems to lie partly in the way he transcribed (notated) and simplified what was originally a highly ornamented melodic/rhythmic entity. The study of vocal style in these eight songs as well as the accompanimental harmonic elaboration will be considered in connection with the structure and meaning of the text. Thus, such a study of the vocal style of Bartók’s folk song arrangements encompasses more than just the style of the tune itself, by drawing the melodic structure and character into a larger context that includes figuration, texture, and the new modal/polymodal and symmetrical harmonic language. The study in general reveals the beginnings of Bartók’s evolution toward the more synthesized, more complex musical idiom of his later vocal settings.Musi