STEPHEN ERDELY

The appointment of Béla Bartók at Columbia University as visiting research asso-
ciate in music, in 1941-42, enabled him to study Yugoslav heroic as well as lyric songs
(so-called women's songs) collected by Harvard professor Milman Parry in 1933-35.
Bartók book Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs, with Lord Albert Bates as co-author,
documents the results of his work. In the introductory chapters he summarizes his
lifelong experiences in dealing with folk music, along with the methods of transcrib-
ing and organizing collected songs, and in the main body of the book he presents
seventy-five lyric songs in meticulous transcription and with comparative notes,
which are trademarks of his scholarship. Albert Lord's contributions to the study are
the transcriptions and translations of the folk song texts, comments on the songs,
and an introductory essay. ¹

The book, however, does not describe Bartók's experiences in working with
Southslavic heroic songs -- an aspect of his research that is by and large unknown.
With one exception, ² his transcriptions of the genre are still in manuscript form held
in the archives of the Parry Collection at Harvard, and his observations, comments,
and reflections are scattered in letters, public communiqués, occasional references,
and footnotes in his book.

The aims of this essay are to bring together these bits and pieces of information
that document Bartók's contribution to the field of epic scholarship and to introduce
new data about his appointment and work at Columbia University by quotations
from the correspondence among George Herzog, Lord, and Bartók, which are pre-
served in the files of the Parry Collection.

Milman Parry was a Homeric scholar who believed that the language of the Iliad
and Odyssey must have evolved out of a long tradition of oral poetry. His purpose
in collecting long narrative songs, still a part of a living tradition in the Balkans, was
to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of oral style, which could then
be carried over to the study of the Homeric poems. He prepared for his field trip

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