By Greg Cahill ​Under the guise of complex art music, composer and ethnomusicologist Béla Bartók brought Hungarian peasant culture into the concert halls of Europe. “There is not much genuine interest anywhere in the world towards this branch of musical science,” Bartók wrote in 1921 as he reflected despondently on his extensive studies of Eastern European folk music. “Who knows, perhaps it is not even as important as its fanatics believe!” Bartók may not have been widely appreciated in his lifetime (1881–1945), but nearly a century after he wrote that lament the world has caught up to the mild-mannered Hungarian composer and pioneering ethnomusicologist. His compositions, including the six string quartets he composed between 1909 and 1939, are rife with innovations inspired by the rustic folk music he collected in the Eastern European countryside with his close friend and colleague, the composer and pedagogue Zoltán Kodály. Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály recorded and transcribed more than 10,000 folk songs. While Brahms had used stylized folk motifs in his “Hungarian Dances,” the prolific Bartók exploited the techniques he learned from authentic folk songs to inform his music. That innovative approach reached its zenith in his string quartets, which stand as a monument of the 20th-century classical canon. Those significant chamber works continue to call—and to challenge—string players. “Beyond the sheer technical challenge of performing the fiendishly difficult score, the major interpretative issues have to do with finding a workable balance between extremes: complexity and clarity, polyphonic austerity and folk-inflected high spirits,” music critic Philip Kennicott wrote in a 2014 National Republic review of the Takács String Quartet’s performance of what the reviewer called the “anxious, hypnotic, intellectually exhausting” Bartók quartet cycle. “In a small, intimate way, they remind the listener of one of the most thrilling moments in all of 20th-century music, the ‘fifth’ door of Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók’s sole opera.” ​READ MORE ​