Béla Bartók

With Liszt, Béla Bartók is regarded as Hungary's greatest composer; the opera Bluebeard's Castle, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, the Concerto for Orchestra and six string quartets are classics of world music.

With Kodály he collected thousands of folk songs and discovered that old Hungarian melodies rest on pentatonic scales like those of Central Asia, Anatolia and Siberia — research that shed light on the shared roots of Hungarian and Turkic music.

In 1936 he travelled to Türkiye and, with the Turkish composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun, recorded Turkish folk music mostly around Adana. A bust of him stands in the yard of the Ankara State Conservatory beside a bust of Saygun.