Bela Bartok Quotes

• Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.

  Bela Bartok

  Mean, Order, Ideas

  61 Copy quote

• Competitions are for horses, not artists.

  Bela Bartok

  Inspirational, Funny, Inspiring

  78 Copy quote

• It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

  Bela Bartok

  Believe, May, Composer

  58 Copy quote

• With maturity comes the wish to economize - to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.

  Bela Bartok

  Maturity, Simple, Wish

  42 Copy quote

• I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.

  Bela Bartok

  Music, Absolutely Nothing

  Quoted in Machlis Introduction to Contemporary Music (1963).

  31 Copy quote

• His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.

  Bela Bartok

  Music, Echoes, Years

  32 Copy quote

• In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

  Bela Bartok

  Art, Development, Matter

  "Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening". Book by Joseph Machlis, 1955.

  25 Copy quote

• Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable.

  Bela Bartok

  Self, Creative, Tone

  "The Listening Composer". Book by George Perle, pp. 46-47, 1996.

  22 Copy quote

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