The Lure of Africa: Béla Bartók’s Journey to Biskra
The Lure of Africa: Béla Bartók’s Journey to Biskra

Summary/Abstract: Compared to his Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian folk music collections, Béla Bartók’s Arab collection is small, consisting of about two hundred melodies. Its significance, however, is disproportionately greater than its size, since this was the first collection of Arab folk music to be recorded with a phonograph at rural locations by an experienced scholar. It may come as a surprise to learn that Bartók, a European composer and an expert in the folk music of Eastern Europe, had an interest in Arab music. Yet as Bartók developed as an ethnomusicologist, the emergence of the idea of collecting folk music on another continent might not be entirely unexpected. [...]

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