ABSTRACT
At the very end of his career, Bela Bartok wrote, "It is almost a truism that contemporary higher art music in Hungary has Eastern European folk music as its basis." This casual acknowledgment belies the considerable effort that Hungarian composers and critics exerted throughout the first half of the twentieth century toward the creation of an art-music culture that embraced folk music. After the Second World War, some audiences in the West continued to find Eastern European music charming and exotic because of its ties to folk music; but many intellectuals there became increasingly hostile to this form of populism because of its Nazi and Stalinist associations. As the sole universally known fact about Bartok's work, folklorism came up in nearly every review of his music. Soviet policy promoted the imitation of folk motifs in all the arts as an essential strategy for conveying the national character of a work.
