Bartok contra Moller or A Hidden Scholarly ars poetica

Abstract

… Follows another popular song, this time a Hungarian one, Möller sings it in its own outlandish tongue, and most effectively. At the general assembly of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society on 29 April 1931, Bartók held a lecture. He opened it—in medias res, as he put it—with the following probably rather shocking statement: “I have to declare that what you call Gypsy music is not Gypsy music.”1 In this apparent paradox Bartók summed up a hypothesis of far-reaching cultural and scholarly significance. He was instigated to present it with such pathos by an event of seemingly secondary importance in his career as a folklorist. Two years earlier, in April 1929, the German music-publishing house B. Schott's Söhne in Mainz had sent him Heinrich Möller's thirteen-volume series, Das Lied der Völker [Peoples' Songs], a voluminous international anthology intended for the German music-loving public. It contained a...