DESCRIPTION:
Here we have 14 year old Lucy Macourt performing Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances at a recent Young AIM Concert held on campus at the Australian Institute of Music (AIM).

The set of 6 Romanian Folk Dances (Román nepi táncok), Sz. 56, was published in 1915, a year when Bartók composed a lot of works based on the Romanian folk music he had collected. These dances, which are amongst his most popular and accessible piano works, are often performed in a version for violin and piano, and there is also a version for orchestra, which was published in 1917 (Sz 68).

The individual movements are :
1 - Stick game (Joc cu bâta) 
2 - Peasant costume (Braul) 
3 - Standing still (Pe loc) 
4 - Song of the mountain horn (Buciumeana) 
5 - A garden gate in Romania (V Poarca Românească) 
6 - Little one (Maruntel)

Young AIM

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The Australian Institute of Music is an institution where each individual student's love of music, and potential, is nurtured and developed.
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AIM provides group musicianship classes using the AMEB syllabus, which can be combined with solo music lessons at a reduced price.
The Young AIM program is the foundation of our school and is where Australia's musicians of tomorrow are born. Young AIM is a world class program for young musicians aged between 3 years and 17 years, where each individual student's love of music, and potential, is nurtured and developed. Young AIM students have available to them a comprehensive program of practical and academic music pursuits, in addition to performance opportunities.

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Saturday 'Shining Stars' Concerts 
One of the unique aspects of the Young AIM program is the provision of concerts. 
Performing is an art that must be learned and practiced. Performing regularly also helps to solidify musical and technical development of instrumentalists.

Young AIM students have the opportunity to perform in free concerts which take place at 11.00am and 2.00pm at AIM. All Young AIM students are encouraged to perform. These concerts are open to the public.

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Béla Bartók was born in the Hungarian town of Nagyszentmiklós (now Sînnicolau Mare in Romania) on 25 March 1881, and received his first instruction in music from his mother, a very capable pianist; his father, the headmaster of a local school, was also musical. After his family moved to Pressburg (now Bratislava in Slovakia) in 1894, he took lessons from László Erkel, son of Ferenc Erkel, Hungary's first important operatic composer, and in 1899 he became a student at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, graduating in 1903. His teachers there were János Koessler, a friend of Brahms, for composition and István Thoman for piano. Bartók, who had given his first public concert at the age of eleven, now began to establish a reputation as a fine pianist that spread well beyond Hungary's borders, and he was soon drawn into teaching: in 1907 he replaced Thoman as professor of piano in the Academy.

Béla Bartók's earliest compositions offer a blend of late Romanticism and nationalist elements, formed under the influences of Wagner, Brahms, Liszt and Strauss, and resulting in works such as Kossuth, an expansive symphonic poem written when he was 23. Around 1905 his friend and fellow-composer Zoltán Kodály directed his attention to Hungarian folk music and, coupled with his discovery of the music of Debussy, Bartók's musical language changed dramatically: it acquired greater focus and purpose -- though initially it remained very rich, as his opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) and ballet The Wooden Prince (1917) demonstrate. But as he absorbed more and more of the spirit of Hungarian folk songs and dances, his own music grew tighter, more concentrated, chromatic and dissonant -- and although a sense of key is sometimes lost in individual passages, Bartók never espoused atonality as a compositional technique.