The Future of Education

The purpose of this academic article is to demonstrate significant perspectives of Bartók’s Mikroskosmos which consists of 153 progressive piano pieces in six volumes at the beginning to a certain higher degree written between 1926 and 1937. The background, objectives, and so forth will be examined in this article which indicates a method of teaching into piece in order to improve musical pupil’s technical performances, and broaden their own musicianship or musical outlook in the 20th century music; in other words, the number of musical learners is able to encounter on several technical problems in style of contemporary music and modern music namely ostinato, whole-tone scale, syncopation, Irregular rhythm, pentatonic melody, chromatic invention, big dissonant tone, double counterpoint, delayed accents, mode mixture, free canon and changing meters. In consequence, Bartók’s Mikroskosmos undoubtedly is one of the most essential modern piano lessons and education, especially in young children. Interestingly, there were a considerable number of music composers who were influenced by Bartók’s Mikroskosmos; for instance, Inventions and Sinfonias by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Etude by Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), Robert Schumann, (1810-1856) and even Claude Debussy (1862-1918) along with musical ideas from George Gershwin (1898-1937), and then its compositional techniques, particularly in materials from traditional peasant music in Eastern Europe or North Africa such as folk melodic and rhythmic patterns of Hungarian and Bulgarian dances including idiom of folklore tunes of Rumanian, Slovenian, Yugoslav, Ruthenian, Turkish and even Arabian origin. Furthermore, a group of music learners can become acquainted with all kinds of musical notations, all the shorthand of time signatures, key, modes and so on. Nonetheless, Mikroskosmos obviously is a combination of major/minor tonality with elements of the modes; the fact is that Bartók’s Mikroskosmos combines technical skills with common practice music and modern music style. Eventually, this article will illustrate various piano skills and techniques in Mikroskosmos’s, in order to aid both professional and amateur pianists who have a desire to develop their technical skills in playing this monumental work of 20th-century classical music. 

Keywords: Béla Bartók, Mikrokosmos, Teaching;