Three Hungarian Folk Songs from Csík

3 Hungarian Folk Songs from Csík (1907)

Bartók wrote nearly 200 settings of folk material, most of them for the piano. Among the first were three song tunes he had heard played in a highly elaborated form on a shepherd’s pipe in the village of Tekeröpatak in the Csík district. While retaining the shepherd’s decorations, he treats them with the utmost modestly in this short work, without developing them either melodically or texturally and adding nothing more distracting than triadic harmonies with the occasional seventh. The third tune was used again in the 8 Hungarian Folk Songs for voice and piano.