Béla Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist who is seen as one of the most important musicians of the 20th century. He is often mentioned alongside Liszt as one of Hungary's greatest composers. Bartók helped start the study of folk music in a scientific way, which later became known as ethnomusicology. He collected and analyzed folk songs, which had a strong influence on how music was studied and understood. Bartók was born on March 25, 1881, in what is now Romania. His mother, a skilled pianist, taught him music at first. The family later moved to Bratislava, where Bartók learned from László Erkel. In 1899, he joined the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest and finished his studies in 1903. Bartók had performed in public from the age of eleven and gained a reputation as a talented pianist beyond Hungary. He also worked as a teacher at the Academy while building his career. At first, Bartók's music showed influences from composers like Wagner, Brahms, Liszt, and Strauss, mixing Romantic and national styles. Around 1905, his friend Zoltán Kodály introduced him to Hungarian folk music. This, along with the music of Debussy, changed Bartók’s style to become more focused, chromatic, and sometimes dissonant, though he did not fully abandon traditional harmony. He traveled and collected songs from many places, publishing some in 1906. In the 1920s and ’30s, Bartók toured widely and gained international fame as both a pianist and a composer. He left teaching in 1934 to focus more on his folk music研究.