In his ethnomusicological writings and lectures, Béla Bartók describes folk music as ‘a natural product, just like the various forms of animal and vegetable life’ and elaborates this view, going on to describe a collection of developmental processes modelled explicitly on biological evolution. In this article, I characterize Bartók's evolutionary model by laying bare the taxonomies and genealogies inherent in his classificatory system. Then, through an analysis of the fifth of hisEight Improvisations on Hungarian Folk Songs(1920), I suggest the outlines of a method for interpreting and analysing Bartók's music engendered from this evolutionary model, a method that involves the elaboration of two ideas: (1) a conceptual shift from a relatively historically static major/minor tonality to a multivalent, ‘evolving’ tonality, and (2) the reconception of motives or themes as having no single original forms, but rather as being related genetically, as somehow evolving in their own right.

中文翻译：

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贝拉·巴托克的民间音乐进化模型

在他的民族音乐学著作和讲座中，Béla Bartók 将民间音乐描述为“一种自然产物，就像各种形式的动植物生命一样”并阐述了这一观点，并继续描述了一系列以生物进化为模型的发展过程。在这篇文章中，我通过揭示他的分类系统中固有的分类法和谱系来描述巴托克的进化模型。然后，通过对他的第五个分析匈牙利民歌的八首即兴曲（1920），我提出了一种解释和分析巴托克音乐的方法大纲，这种方法源于这种进化模型，这种方法涉及对两个想法的阐述：（1）从相对历史上相对静态的大调/小调调到多价的、“不断演变的”调性，以及（2）对动机或主题的重新理解为没有单一的原始形式，而是在基因上相关，以某种方式在其自身的权利中进化。