TO some sensitive musical ears, the topic for today’s column might come as an unwelcome or even aggressive surprise. It’s the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok. Oh no, not another championship drive, I hear someone growl. No indeed; not this time. The subject has been pretty-much self-selecting from recent developments: I’ve been embroiled in listening to a number of starry new recordings of some of Bartok’s music, including the awesome Miraculous Mandarin, in both its full ballet and Suite formats, the late Third Piano Concerto and the chamber music trio, Contrasts, issued on different labels by the Philharmonia Orchestra with Esa-Pekka Salonen and by the London Symphony Orchestra with Valery Gergiev, all with various soloists. And the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with conductor Rumon Gamba, recently gave a superlative account of Bartok’s Divertimento for strings.

It is the case that some music lovers simply don’t like the music of Bartok, and they can be unreserved in their expression. I remember one in particular who turned his nose up at whatever it was, and stated flatly that he disliked its “modernity”, which seemed to him “jagged, un-melodious and aggressive”. I suggested that “modernity” was hardly the word for it, as Bartok had been dead since 1945. He mulled that one over, curled his lip, and spat out the unforgettable phrase: “That’s not long-enough dead for my taste, chum.”

I loved the tang of Bartok’s music from the start. I felt the same enthusiasm and eyes-screwed-up pleasure I had had the first time I sooked soor plooms. To my young ears, there was nothing quite to match the sheer bite and exhilarating ear-bashing delivered by Bartok’s paradigm of percussive pianism, the Allegro Barbaro, a piece of music that simply did everything it said on the tin. Broadly, I tended to keep my new passion to myself, with the volume turned down. I suspected that Tumelty senior, whose tastes veered more towards civilised music of classical poise and elegant balance, could have no more approved of my penchant for this wild Hungarian music than he did of my adolescent passion for Little Richard, whose sweaty hand I shook during his off-the-stage tour of the aisles at his unforgettable concert in the Odeon Cinema in Renfield Street.

Seriously, what had always intrigued me about Bartok’s music was its accent, though whatever that accent might be, as a young adherent of the music, I had no idea. It was something very individualistic, and not remotely like the “Hungarian accent” that could be heard in Brahms and in the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt, to which I was also addicted from first hearing. The key word missing in my youth was “authentic”.

In his own youth, Bela Bartok, who was born in 1881, was invited to join the Vienna Conservatoire to undertake his musical studies. He elected instead to go to the Budapest Academy, as had Dohnanyi before him. Nascent nationalism? It’s possible it was in his DNA. Though his early influences were, perhaps predictably, Wagner and Strauss, with a fundamental dash of Debussy broadening and exciting his palette in composition, it wasn’t long before Bartok was making his first transcription of an authentic Hungarian folk song. In 1904 he heard a raw, earthy folk song from a woman in a Hungarian village. It had a formative influence on him. Within months he had defined a strategy for the collection and study of ethnic native folk songs from villages and the byways throughout Hungary. There was nothing cosmetic in the operation. It was to be profound and exhaustive. It was also massive. He recruited a colleague to help. That was Kodaly. By 1906 they had published a set of 20 numbers in arrangement, 10 each by the two composers. They were hauling stuff out of an oral tradition that was probably on the road to extinction as villages withered, villagers died and communities moved on, or became “modernised” in the relentless march of “progress”. The collecting and arranging of folk materials went on for years. It reads like a life and death rescue mission, though I don’t know if Bartok perceived the full social implications of his work. He certainly extended it to take in the folk music of Slavs and Romanians.

And as he went on, every single aspect of the accent in the music he collected fed back into his own compositions. The rhythms, melodic characteristics, the textures and the harmonies of his own music, from large-scale concertos to tiny piano compositions, all pulsing with a folk music quality that clearly suffused Bartok’s consciousness, his intellect, and the very core of his musical language. Every time he put pen to paper, that is the way it came out, as a natural and authentic instinct.