Béla Bartók has a way of finding Sylvia Parker.

Parker, UVM’s senior lecturer of music theory and piano, thought the modernist Hungarian composer was hard to play and harder to listen to when she was young, but his music  grew on her and is now a mainstay of her repertory. A year after she moved to Riverton, Vt. in 1984, she discovered that Bartók had once spent a summer idyll at a property next door. And after studying Bartók’s piano harmonizations of peasant folk songs the composer and pioneering ethnomusicologist had recorded in the Eastern European countryside, she was so taken by the brilliant compositions, she decided to be the first person on earth to record all 152 of them together in a single album.

Parker’s two-CD set, Peasant Jewels, was released by Centaur Records in May. 

Over his lifetime, spanning 1881-1945, Bartók recorded more than 1,000 peasant melodies, largely in the countryside of Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. The strange scales and odd rhythms of the tunes, which were unaccompanied, inspired him musically, freeing him from the strictures of his classical training and powerfully influencing his own compositions.

In 2013 Parker set to work on better understanding this influence by analyzing the musical connections between six of the peasant songs and the piano arrangements Bartók composed for them in a little known piece called The Petite Suite.

An indispensable tool in her research was a new catalog that listed all of Bartók’s compositions that quoted the peasant melodies and provided information about when and where they were recorded. In browsing through the catalog, Parker grew curious. “I wanted to hear a recording of this melody as it really sounded sung by a peasant and that instance over there where it's a piano piece,” she says.

Flicker

Bartók's peasant recordings, newly digitzed, were available on the CD that came with the catalog. But when she went looking for the 150 plus he had written piano arrangements for, she was frustrated, finding them buried in recordings of larger works by Bartók or entombed even deeper in recordings of his complete piano works.

A thought began to flicker in Parker’s mind. “I started concocting this idea of maybe recording them,” she says. But doubts and questions arose. How many pieces were there? Was this a feasible collection? Did she dare take it on?

After Parker finished her research on The Petite Suite, presenting it at an international conference in Buenos Aires and writing it up for publication, her internal dialog about the potential recording project “grew pretty intense.”   

Then she began sampling a range of the pieces at the piano, using the catalog to identify them and going to her personal library, which included all of Bartok’s piano works, for the sheet music.

“I realized I could play them,” she says. “I wasn't asking myself to perform a monster concerto.”

In the fall of 2103, she finally worked up the courage to speak aloud about her musings. She asked Joe Capps, UVM’s jazz guitar instructor who is also an active recording engineer, if he thought the project was worthwhile and if he’d be interested in recording the music.

Capps was enthusiastic. “He said, ‘Oh, definitely, yes.’ And then I had ask myself, ‘Definitely yes?’”

Over the next few weeks, she finally committed. The moment the fall semester ended, she set to work, practicing five and six hours a day for six weeks to prepare for the recording sessions with Capps.

Samurai

She recorded the music on the stage of the Recital Hall, playing the sonorous Steinway piano interim UVM president Ed Colodny and his wife Nancy had donated the funds for a decade earlier, in two four-hour stints broken by another month long bout of practicing.

Capps was bowled over by her ability to play multiple takes of one piece, pause, then move on to the next.   

“I was like, how can she play that long?” Capps says. “She’s a samurai.”

Over the spring 2014 semester, she spent weeks sifting through the 500-plus takes Capps had recorded, then working with him in his studio in multiple sessions to assemble the final master.

The result was worth the time and effort.  

“What impressed me was the care and the expressivity that she brings to those pieces, many of which were very simple and are often used as teaching pieces,” says Larry Read, a longtime professor of composition at UVM, who retired in 2012 to compose full-time. “She treats them as if they were Mozart sonatas.” 

Alison Cerutti, a central Vermont-based professional pianist and teacher and former student of Parker’s, isn’t surprised at the tenacity and endurance she brought to the project and the recording sessions.

At the beginning of her lessons, Parker “would be bright and energetic and cheerful,” Cerutti says, “and at the end in an hour plus, I would be just worn out and exhausted and ready for dinner and bed, and she would still be bright and energetic and cheerful. That energy and persistence is perfect for undertaking a project this big.” 

Go deeper into Bartók's world

In this demonstration, Parker plays a Franz Liszt melody inspired by what he thought was authentic Hungarian folk music, then an excerpt from his "Rhapsody No. 2 for Piano" that incorporates it. Then she plays an actual peasant melody Bartók recorded and the piano arrangement he composed for it.

Read on below for more background about Bartók, Liszt and their different conceptions and use of folk music in their composition. 

Epiphany

Bela Bartók, newly graduated from the Budapest Academy of Music, was vacationing at a boarding house in northern Hungary in 1904, when a thunderbolt struck.

An ardent Hungarian nationalist, he had studied piano and composition at the academy and was at work on a Rhapsody for Piano influenced by his fellow Hungarian Franz Liszt. Like Liszt, Bartók incorporated what he thought was Hungarian folk music into his composition.

But now, outside the door of his room, Bartók heard a peasant woman singing songs to the children in her care that were unlike anything he knew. The melodies were alien and haunting, with jagged intervals and odd scales. Bartók left his room and asked the woman to sing more songs, which he wrote down one after another.

Liszt loved what he thought was the native folk music of Hungary – dazzling showpieces performed by Roma orchestras throughout Europe -- and based some of his most popular compositions, like the Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano, on the music he heard performed on the streets by virtuoso Roma violinists.

Bartók now realized that this showy street music was a composed, popularized version of Hungary’s authentic folk music, which had ancient roots outside the western classical tradition.

Bartók’s experience at the boarding house changed him forever. Within a year he was traveling through the Eastern European countryside recording peasant music on what was then state-of-the-art equipment -- an Edison wax cylinder -- an avocation he continued throughout his life, eventually recording more than 1,000 songs in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Turkey and northern Africa.

His own music, which also drew on his classical training and was influenced by the work of other modernists like Debussy and Stravinsky, was so suffused with the folk material that it became what he called his mother tongue.