Preview 2010
 
 
 
 
 


7th International Music Festival Phnom Penh 2010

Classic meets Folk
a musical transformation

In music, a transformation consists of any operation or process that a composer, performer, or analyst may apply to a musical variable.

Recycling folk songs/dances was one of the main ways for composers to create music in the twentieth century. Hungarian composer Béla Bartók pioneered this methodology, transcribing thousands of folk melodies and incorporating them into his own compositions. In this activity, students recognize and analyze each of the steps of the transformation, starting with the folk song to the subsequent creative stages: from compositional draft, to finished score, to recorded performance. In most cases, one or more of the transformational stages is not readily available and needs to be inferred.