The Hungarian composer Bela Bartok (1881-1945), unquestionably the
twentieth-century’s most authoritative collector and analyst of Eastern
European, Asian and Balkan folk music, composed the Concerto for
Orchestra (1943) near the end of his career.1 His output was
consistently marked by a stylistic synthesis of Western art music and
the folk music of Eastern Europe, along with techniques of his own
invention, often incorporating musical geometry. He also turned to
styles such as neo-Classicism (or more specifically, neo-Baroque) and
Primitivism, which, in common with Stravinsky, he explored along with
the compositional technique of bitonality. Bartok pioneered the
technique of polymodal chromaticism, using diverse modes derived
from art music and folk music simultaneously. His use of dissonance
never extended to atonality, as his chromatic compositions retained a
fundamental pitch, and from the 1930s his compositional style became
more tonal