Bela Bartok Quotations

I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Competitions are for horses, not artists.