Study On Folk Factors In Bartók's Three Piano Suites

Bela Bartok is a famous Hungarian ethnomusicologist, as well as renowned composer and pianist, who devoted himself to the collection and research of folk music all through his life, successfully combined folk factors with composing techniques in the twentieth century, endowed folk music with unprecedented significance, and made one of the greatest contributions to the piano music in new national school. In this thesis, through the study of three piano suites by Bartok,the author revealed the folk factors included in them and provided the evidence of how to grasp Bartok works' performance style and pedagogy.In this thesis, suite was selected as point of departure, by using the analytic method in three chapters. The first chapter generally described the background of Bartok's composition, introduced the piano music genres in 20th century, the environment where Bartok grew up and his collection of folk music. The second chapter analyzed three piano suites by Bartok, according to the different degrees to which folk factors are absorbed into the music, in terms of aspects of rhythm types, modal scales, interval, motive, ostinato, and bi-modality. In this chapter, characters were recapitulated to materialize the folk music. In the third chapter, inspirations were illuminated, which were provided by Bartok's piano music and applied to performance and teaching, its place and research value in piano literature were further discussed.Bartok's piano works have important research value, which developed a school of his own in the performance skill and music representation; they filled the blank of the traditional performance and teaching, and provided valuable information for us to know Hungary and Eastern nationalities'music and the language of the 20th century music better.