The Canonization of Béla Bartók

Abstract

Abstract Canons have been increasingly invoked in discussions of artistic worth since the early 1970s and musical worth since the early 1980s.1 In the 1990s, canons feature prominently in debates about music and gender, national musics, musical genres, and curricula of music education.2 Most frequently, repertory or disciplinary canons are analyzed as a preliminary stage to canonic dismantlement, reformulation, or reinforcement. The focus has tended to be on the musical objects—the lists of musical repertories or subdisciplines—and those who have been responsible for such listings, the canonizers.3 The canonized individuals and how they came to be canonized have received less attention, their position in the canonic scheme of things often being established summarily by current statistics or simply taken as given.