Béla Bartók

Béla Viktor János Bartók was born 25 March 1881 in Hungary, trained as a pianist and composer, but spent years in villages recording farmers' songs on wax cylinders - work that made him a founder of comparative musicology, later called ethnomusicology. He didn't just collect; he analyzed, then wove those scales and rhythms into pieces like the opera Bluebeard's Castle, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the Concerto for Orchestra, and six string quartets. Where Schoenberg shattered tonality, Bartók built an amalgam: tonal anchors, unorthodox scales, atonal passages, all held together by the structural logic he'd learned from peasants. He died 26 September 1945, having shown generations of composers they could draw on any tradition without pastiche. He and Liszt remain Hungary's twin peaks.