Witnesses of a Special “Interethnic” Relationship : The Bartók Letters of the Brăiloiu Estate

Biró, Viola (2023) Witnesses of a Special “Interethnic” Relationship : The Bartók Letters of the Brăiloiu Estate. MUSICOLOGY PAPERS, 37 (1). pp. 7-18. ISSN 2068-8601

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Abstract

The scholarly relationship between Béla Bartók and Constantin Brăiloiu is a beautiful and highly instructive episode in the history of ethnomusicology beyond borders. Brăiloiu was Bartók’s most important associate concerning Romanian folk music research, a devoted supporter of his work and propagator of his most important achievements. Bartók, in turn, cited the system of documentation applied by the research group of his younger colleague as an exemplary method in his “precepts of music folklore”. The correspondence between these two authorities of folk music research offers deep insight into their collaboration. Ferenc László, the most assiduous editor of these letters, devoted a large and systematic article to discussing the main lessons of these documents available by the 1980s. A rather recently discovered collection of 36 Bartók letters survived in the Paris Brăiloiu estate, however, received considerably less attention in the literature. These letters, written mostly between 1933 and 1939, shed light on the late workshop of Bartók the folklorist: there occur issues related to Bartók’s late revision of his Romanian folk music collection, questions related to phonograph and gramophone recordings, or discrepancies between the views of both on transcribing and analyzing folk music, among others. In my article I would like to draw attention to some particularly interesting points of this material.

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