George Szirtes on "Bartok and Nationalism"

[Guest]

Poet and translator George Szirtes has put the talk he gave on "Bartok and Nationalism" at the "The Rest is Noise" festival up on his blog.

It's divided into six parts. Part One is at http://georgeszirtes.blogspot.co.uk/...ry-in-six.html Being in a blog format, if you start on the homepage you have to work your way down past the five later parts to get to part one.

It's more about the history of (Hungarian) nationalism than any detailed analysis of Bartok's music which is why I've put it here rather than in the Talking About Music forum, but feel free to move it if you think it belongs there.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks for this, Byas'd.

Not having yet read any of the attachments, it's maybe worth remarking that Bartok started out as a nationalist - his symphonic poem "Kossuth", composed in 1902 in tribute to a leader of the forces fighting Hungarian occupation - his studies into Magyar folk music, initially intended to counter the popularised view of what constituted it, led him beyond his country's national boundaries to investigate its genesis way beyond Hungary or indeed the Balkan countries collectively, to make him in effect one of the first ethnomusicologists.