The string quartets of the 20th Century were heavily influenced by the bloodletting of World War I and the nihilism that followed. Music would never be the same. Bela Bartok’s quartets are among the best of this dissonant collection.
Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly (ko-DYE-ee) would walk into Hungarian farming villages with a primitive Edison wax cylinder recorder to capture the sounds of ancient Magyar folk tunes before the new century could sweep them away. “Sing into the chicken paprikash,” one of them would say, as he hid the machine on the table among the food. The quartets of both men are filled with Hungarian folk music.
This is from the fourth of Bartok’s quartets and features pizzicato playing, which is plucking the strings.
Nice!