n several of his writings on folk music Bela Bart6k recalls an incident
I that happened to him in 1904 during a visit to a small village in
Tran- 1 syl vania. Quite by chance he heard there an eighteen-year-old
Hun- garian peasant girl singing Hungarian folk songs whose construction
was 2 significantly different from the songs he had known until then.
This experience appealed to his imagination far deeper than chance oc-
currences usually do. It sparked in him a creative fire that was there-
after to impart to his music certain characteristics that are
recognizable today as indigenous to the Bart6kian style of composition.
The inspirational value of the incident was rekindled by return trips to
Transylvania. During these trips he was not merely listening. He began
notating, melodies, building them into a coordinated collection. Soon
Bart6k's itinerary took him into villages populated in checkered
proximity by both Hungarians and Rumanians, thence into little
communities where the population was exclusively Rumanian. There he
discovered that their songs were much less, if at all, influenced by the
urban civilization of Western Europe than those he had collected in
Hungarian villages. In an interview he gave to a Transylvanian newspaper
in 1922, Bart6k described the difference between the available Hungarian
and Rumanian songs.