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The Microcosm of String Ensemble Music
In our short film, András Soós, the author and the performers talk about his four-volume series of publications entitled The Microcosm of String Ensemble Music.
Bartók's Mikrokosmos is perhaps the most influential series of piano pieces of the 20th century, and one of the foundational works of piano pedagogic literature.
The Microcosm of String Ensemble Music offers 148 transcriptions from the series for playing in various string ensembles, arranged in four volumes according to difficulty.
The History of Editio Musica Budapest
The Hungarian State Music Publisher (the legal predecessor of Editio Musica Budapest) was founded by government decree seventy years ago on July 1, 1950.
Music publishing has a great tradition in Hungary. The oldest firm (the reputable Rózsavölgyi & Co.) started its activities 165 years ago, and was the most prominent domestic music publisher for a century; it built up a rich and diverse catalogue during these decades. At the beginning of the century it was the first publisher of Bartók and Kodály, and although the two great composers changed to foreign companies after the 1910s in hopes of better international distribution, Rózsavölgyi remained the publisher and promoter of several excellent Hungarian composers between the two World Wars, including Ernst von Dohnányi, Leo Weiner, and László Lajtha.
Publishing Árpád Pejtsik’s scores for teaching chamber music
Árpád Pejtsik’s name is familiar to all who have learned or taught the cello in recent decades. Editio Musica Budapest has issued over a hundred of his works, some expressly for teaching and some to broaden the repertoire available for performance.
The scores have sold well all over the world and were used internationally for examining material.
Spotlight on Bartok
Faces of contemporary music in music education
One of the gems of Editio Musica Budapest is its increasingly expanding series of piano pieces by György Kurtág entitled Games. Now the EMB catalogue is being enriched with two new related publications: János Bali’s exciting and inspiring work, Introduction to the Avant-garde for Recorder Players, and György Orbán’s two-volume, completely individual Aulos: Piano Pieces for Advanced Players to Practise Polyphony.
Beyond their basic differences (range, instruments, and target audience), the three works share common features, for example, an intensive connection with the music of the past and the stress on improvised elements, but most of all, going far beyond any educational aim, they enrich the repertoire of contemporary music with significant, exciting, unmistakeably unique-sounding compositions.
