A portion of the chart showing Abbreviations Used in the Musical Examples (1960) from Folk Music of Hungary, by Zoltán Kodály, Enlarged edition revised by Lajos Vargyas, Translated by Ronald Tempest and Cynthia Jolly, Translation revised by Laurence Picken, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1971, p.10.

Bartók and the Use of Arrows

Bartók was well aware of the fact that an accurate transcription of pitch is not only a problem of notation, but also of ear training. In Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (1943), Bartók discussed pitch in rather unsophisticated terms of quartertones, a convenient label which his contemporaries could easily understand. Bartók's feelings about the arrows seem ambivolent, because of the difficulty of accurately identifying quartertones.

"An arrow pointing downward means lowered pitch, almost reaching the quarter tone below; pointing upwards it means raised pitch, not quite or almost reaching the quarter tone above. These arrows may be used in conjunction with both flats and sharps, too, where they will conceivably be used for differences of exactly one quarter tone. They were almost never employed here because of that great difficulty in determining by ear whether the difference is exactly a quarter tone or only approximately. Obviously these arrows and comparable symbols used by others are signs of approximate value, and are, perhaps, the only practical means to be used concerning pitch deviations in Eastern European folk music." [p. 4]

Contrary to these remarks, Bartók actually used the arrows quite often. Although arrows were also adopted by his colleague Zoltán Kodály, Kodály almost never employed the arrows.

Bartók's Manuscripts

A portion of Bartók's manuscript (1923?) from the Magyar Rádió-Néprajzi Múzeum Collection, which appears in The Hungarian Folk Song, by Béla Bartók, Edited by Benjamin Suchoff, Translated by M.D. Calvocoressi, with annotations by Zoltán Kodály, State University of New York Press, Albany New York, 1981, p. 1ii.

Bartók's Published Transcriptions

A portion of Music Example No. 30 (1941?), from Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs: Texts and Translations of Seventy-Five Folk Songs from the Milman Parry Collection and a Morphology of Serbo-Croatian Folk Melodies, by Béla Bartók and Albert B. Lord, with a foreword by George Herzog, Columbian University Press, New York, 1951, p. 175.

Bartók on Cents Notation

Bartók was aware of other practices of pitch transcription. The following remarks, made just two years before his death, reveal his regret for not having learned to use the system of cents notation to indicate more precise deviations of pitch from the standard Western twelve equidistant pitches.

"In this system, every tempered half tone is divided into 100 equal cents, and it is possible to express every tone in cents instead of its number of vibrations. In many cases, especially in melodies with typical tone deviations of degree, such measurements would give highly interesting and mathematically exact data about the deviations, as well as about their constancy. Some musicologists, for example, Erich von Hornbostel and Idelsohn, frequently used this procedure. I am sorry to say that I never had occasion to use it myself."