Chances are, you can relate to Sally Brown in this 1975 Peanuts strip.

French, Bartók quartets, War and Peace, and gardening? Me neither. Loafing around in the summer? Yeah, duh.

And if you haven’t heard of Bartók, you can probably guess, based on those other divertissements of the cultured elite. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bartók.

Unlike Sally, though, we now have YouTube. I discovered Béla Bartók not as a musicology student thumbing through a dusty 1945 Boosey & Hawkes hardcover but as an angsty twelve-year-old clicking through YouTube. As much as my privilege of taking piano lessons from age eight sent me down the classical music Internet wormhole in the first place, Bartók was unlike anything I’d heard before. In fact, he shook up my understanding of music and spoke to me so profoundly that when I saw this comic strip a few months later, I forgot that anyone considered the appreciation of Bartók quartets a rarefied pastime.

When I was twelve years old, I remember feeling so saddened and comforted at once by the beauty of Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet (1928). It was not the beauty of Mozart (one imagines powdered wigs) or the shock of an ice bath—it was somewhere in between. Bartók plunges us into discordant violin squawks and seething cello lines that forever attempt a furious declamation, only to cut themselves off. But then Bartók brings the chaos to a close. He summons, from the ether, tones that enter every three seconds and accumulate into a hushed major chord.

He then inflects this diaphanous harmony with a touch of emotion through vibrato, a technique where the players allow the notes to quiver. I didn’t cry, but my feeling of melancholic wonder was new and mysterious. (I later discovered that this reaction was Bartók’s goal; he indicated a tempo of “Not Too Slow” as a caution against Romantic oversentimentality.) Against this sparse nocturnal backdrop, the cello, devastatingly lonely, sings to itself. The violins stridulate like crickets, and that’s just not me being poetic—Bartók intended these slow moments as “night music”—evocations of the eerie expectancy of birds and insects at night. 

The motion intensifies again; the string players rapidly pluck, snap, and otherwise torture their instruments to a diabolical groove that until 1970 was probably the closest thing to heavy metal. All this chaotic dissonance is probably why people complain about modernism, but I didn’t know that this was modernism or that people complained. I just felt the music’s forceful realism speak to me. If Mozart was speaking to Salzburg aristocrats, Bartók was speaking to people who have had a long argument or a trauma and need to run outside alone to smell cool grass or look at the stars, however serene or lonely that may be.

But have you had the chance to hear Bartók speaking to you? Maybe you’ve heard of him in allusions: in Stanley Kubrick’s use of his music in The Shining when Danny roams the hallways, or Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Bartók remix “The Barbarian,” or the albino bat named Bartók in Anastasia (which, to be fair, is a perfectly reasonable allusion to Bartók’s gaunt face and white hair). At best, maybe you heard he’s an impersonal modernist and a bit of a creep to boot.

This is all (somewhat) fair. In his life Bartók really was known as a puritan, a workaholic, an extreme introvert concealing worlds beneath his forlorn and vaguely vampiric face. He considered himself “the future Hungarian Beethoven,” whose name and works would last tens of thousands of years. But he played the piano for audiences, as composer Antal Molnár observed, with an apathetic demeanor, acknowledging the applause only reluctantly. He seemed to prefer animals to people; he once saw scrawny cows in a crumbling barn and condemned the farmer even though the farmer lived in equally miserable conditions. He would sometimes compose inspired by the smell of a basin of blood. According to Kodaly, Bartók enthusiastically collected, into his adulthood, not just folk tunes and peasant artifacts but also plants, beetles, butterflies and stones.

The monumental Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist Béla Bartók was born in 1881 in the village of Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary. According to his mother, a faulty smallpox vaccination gave him a rash over his whole body that lasted for the first five years of his life. Kids would shout “Poor little Béla!”, cementing Bartók’s anxiety surrounding social interaction. Meanwhile he had a knack for distinguishing the different dance rhythms his mother played on the piano before he could even speak in sentences, and could play forty piano pieces by the age of four. Losing his father at age seven didn’t help with his misery, but he clung tighter to his mother, his conscientious rigor, and his musical interests.

As a wave of nationalism swept Hungary amid Austria’s stagnant rule, Bartók studied piano and composition not in Vienna, but at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. At the age of 22, Bartók honored revolutionary leader Ferenc Kossuth with a symphonic poem fusing Richard Strauss’s aesthetic with a distinctive Hungarian ethos; the performance was positively received despite controversy surrounding his distortion of the Austrian national anthem.

Bartók continued on to collaborate with Zoltan Kodaly, whose compositions were also informed by Hungarian music. But the two composers discovered that what they knew as Hungarian folk was instead the music of urban gypsy or Roma people. In a watershed moment that birthed both Bartók’s novel musical style and the academic field of ethnomusicology, in 1904 Bartók heard an eighteen-year-old peasant woman named Lidi Dósa sing a genuine Transylvanian folk tune. He immediately got a grant to conduct fieldwork in remote parts of Hungary with Kodaly, observing peasants’ behavior and recording their music with phonographs.

The possibilities of Hungarian peasant music enthralled Bartók, not only as creative fuel for his Hungarian nationalist fervor but also as an escape from the Western European musical hegemony. In a seminal paper on peasant music, he argued that folk music should be used to revitalize the Hungarian musical tradition: “Its expressive power is amazing, and at the same time it is void of all sentimentality and superfluous ornaments.” He could swap vanilla major and minor scales for medieval modes, strict rhythmic structures for vibrant dance patterns, and boring harmonies for new ones audiences had never heard. 

Take for example Bartók’s relatively well-known Romanian Folk Dances. My absolute favorite performance (again, speaking as an enthused twelve-year-old) features both the classical Danubia orchestra playing Bartók’s score and a Hungarian folk troupe called Muzsikás that plays the original materials that Bartók was working with. A grayed and mustachioed man in a black hat plays a spooky fast melody on his long wooden flute; every note contains the low growl of his voice. A young, enthusiastic conductor tells the orchestra to resume the melody: now slower, more dignified, swathed with elegant strings.

But Bartók, remember, is not Mozart. The piece erupts into an exuberant, barely-controlled dance in a lively duple meter (think, “one two one two one two…!”). We get a wildly groovy violin solo with bass slaps from Muzsikás. Then the orchestra and Muzsikás join together in a rollicking finale, which is deeply moving not only musically but also politically as a symbolic union of Romania and Hungary (although the territories of Hungary and Romania had been under dispute, what mattered to Bartók was Transylvanian peasant music).

Later in his life, in fact, Bartók expanded his ethnomusicological pursuits and musical goals to encompass Arabic, Indonesian, and Chinese traditions. He discovered how prevalent the pentatonic scale was in most musics. For example, the collection of notes he uses in the aforementioned spooky Romanian folk dance pervades Algerian and gypsy music alike. Scholar J. Kárpati argues that this study helped Bartók revise his nationalist aims into a broader concept of human brotherhood. Bartók’s famous Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta—the piece used by Kubrick in The Shining—encompasses so many traditions. There’s the Indonesian pelog scale that makes the celesta chimes and harp swirls sound so ghostly, the nature sounds that inspired the insect-like cymbal crashes and string plucks, and the Western classical structures that give this masterpiece of horror its mathematically precise delivery. 

Bartók died, ill from leukemia and feeling isolated in New York City, in 1945, before he could see the aftermath of the Second World War and the Nazi Occupation he had fled. Only ten people attended his funeral, but his influence, even in America, has been widespread and obvious. The field of ethnomusicology, film music, jazz musicians like Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, and so many other musical developments and figures credit Bartók with endless inspiration. Bartók, even if an idiosyncratic and largely inscrutable character, wasn’t the elitist snooze Sally Brown thought he was. But you might still be asking yourself, what does Bartók have to say to me?

I can only reiterate my own experiences. Since I was twelve, Bartók has been challenging my concept of beauty as something pretty, slow, and refined. Does life really feel like the pleasantries Mozart wrote for the Salzburg court? The vitality in Bartók’s music has its closest counterparts in metal, jazz, and other traditions that elevate rawness, boldness, stubbornness, and spontaneous expression to the highest levels of artistic excellence. As much as Bartók unfortunately struggled to communicate or connect with the people he knew, his ferocious, eccentric, yearning inner child says so much through his music. He continues to transport even twelve-year-olds to states of quiet transcendence.