Béla Viktor János Bartók (March 25 1881 – September 26 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and collector of Eastern European and Middle Eastern folk music. He is considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century and was also one of the founders of the field of ethnomusicology, the study and ethnography of folk music. Childhood and early years Béla Bartók was born in the small Transylvanian town of Nagyszentmiklós in Austria-Hungary (now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania). He displayed notable musical talent very early in life: according to his mother, he could distinguish between different dance rhythms that she played on the piano even before he learned to speak in complete sentences (Gillies 1990,). By the age of four, he was able to play 40 songs on the piano, and his mother began formally teaching him the next year. Béla was a small and sickly child, and suffered from a painful chronic rash until the age of

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