The scholarly relationship between Béla Bartók and Constantin Brăiloiu is a beautiful
and highly instructive episode in the history of ethnomusicology beyond borders. Brăiloiu
was Bartók’s most important associate concerning Romanian folk music research, a devoted
supporter of his work and propagator of his most important achievements. Bartók, in
turn, cited the system of documentation applied by the research group of his younger
colleague as an exemplary method in his “precepts of music folklore”. The correspondence
between these two authorities of folk music research offers deep insight into their
collaboration. Ferenc László, the most assiduous editor of these letters, devoted
a large and systematic article to discussing the main lessons of these documents available
by the 1980s. A rather recently discovered collection of 36 Bartók letters survived
in the Paris Brăiloiu estate, however, received considerably less attention in the
literature. These letters, written mostly between 1933 and 1939, shed light on the
late workshop of Bartók the folklorist: there occur issues related to Bartók’s late
revision of his Romanian folk music collection, questions related to phonograph and
gramophone recordings, or discrepancies between the views of both on transcribing
and analyzing folk music, among others. In my article I would like to draw attention
to some particularly interesting points of this material.
