Bartók's Bulgaria: Folk music collecting and Balkan social history.

The present study has three major objectives: 1) to critically reexamine Bartók's engagement with and knowledge of Bulgarian traditional music, including his ethnographic scholarship, correspondence with native folklorists, compositional use of additive rhythms, and analysis of Bulgarian folk song collections; 2) to evaluate the kinds of information encoded in these collections, and how these data shaped Bartók's thinking about Bulgarian music; and 3) to consider the significance of such collections, and of folk songs in general, for understanding contemporary Balkan history, politics, and social identity.