Bartók and the Berlin school of ethnomusicology

Lampert, Vera (2008) Bartók and the Berlin school of ethnomusicology. Studia Musicologica, 49 (3-4). pp. 383-405. ISSN 1788-6244

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Abstract

There is a great affinity between Bartók’s scholarly works and that of the members of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv — established in 1900 and considered as the cradle of the discipline of ethnomusicology — both in their methods and philosophical outlook. Several publications of the Berlin scholars are extant in Bartók’s library. They exerted significant influence on Bartók’s folkloristic output, from the methods of transcription and analysis, to the publication of folk material. Bartók also had personal connections with two of the members of the school. He contacted the director of the institution, Erich von Hornbostel, in 1912, wanting to take part in the galvanoplastic preservation and exchange program, introduced in Berlin a few years earlier. Only ten of Bartók’s cylinders could be processed before the war broke out, putting an end to this effort. A few years later Hornbostel took on the publishing of Bartók’s monograph, Volksmusik der Rumänen von Maramureş in the series Sammelbände der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft . Bartók also met and corresponded with another outstanding member of the Berlin School of Ethnomusicology, Robert Lachmann, the chairman of the committee on sound recordings, in the work of which Bartók also participated in 1932 at the Congress of Arab Music in Cairo.

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