Like Brahms, Béla Bartók (1881-1945) began his musical career as a pianist. Bartók, too, became a virtuoso performer.  Also like Brahms, he drew on Hungarian folk music to produce short pieces for the piano.  In 1931 he selected five of these and orchestrated them under the title Hungarian Sketches.

         Four of these are dances. But they sound nothing like the Hungarian Dances of Brahms.

         The reason is that there is Hungarian folk music, and then there is Hungarian gypsy folk music.  Brahms (and Liszt before him) drew on Hungarian gypsy music, but simply called it Hungarian.  Bartók, however, drew on the music of the Magyar peasants of the the Hungarian countryside.  Starting in 1908, with his friend Zoltán Kodály, he traveled across Transylvania, often lugging bulky and primitive recording equipment, gathering thousands of songs, making sound recordings of them or transcribing them by hand.

         He found that few of the melodies he came across were in the  conventional major and minor scales.  They were more likely to be based on pentatonic scales, similar to those in Asian folk traditions.  What’s more, they were monodies: they consisted of a single melodic line, without any accompaniment or harmonizing voice or voices.

         And because of the scales they were in, the traditional Western classical rules of harmony wouldn’t work.  So Bartók set about developing a new way of harmonizing, growing out of the tunes he had found and the scales they were in.  In this way he constructed his piano pieces, as well as accompaniments for countless songs using other instruments.

         And they will never be mistaken for Brahms.

         Bartók, in this suite, gives every piece a name. (Brahms merely numbered his Hungarian Dances.)

         1 - “Evening in the Village” (sometimes translated as “Evening in Transylvania.”) Bucolic and serene, it may remind some of passages from Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite.

         2 - “Bear Dance”  Bartók wrote that the piece was intended as an “Impression of a bear dancing to the song of his leader and growling to the accompaniment of a drum.”

         3 - “Melody” A gentle theme that grows steadily in volume as it passes from the violins to the clarinet to the low strings.

         4 - “A Bit Tipsy” A humorous portrayal of a staggering drunk.

         5 - “Dance of the Swineherds”  The only piece to use an actual folk song. A lively dance.

         Bartók orchestrated these pieces as a commercial venture, so that he could profit from their performances, both in concert halls and on the radio, which, in 1931, when these pieces were published, was just coming into its heyday.