Béla Viktor Janos Bartók, born on 25 March 1881, died on 26 September 1945, was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology. From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano under Istvan Thoman, a former student of Franz Liszt, and composition under Janos Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. From 1907, he also began to be influenced by the French composer Claude Debussy, whose compositions Kodaly had brought back from Paris. Bartók's large-scale orchestral works were still in the style of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which showed his growing interest in folk music. The first piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor (1908), which contains folk-like elements. He began teaching as a piano professor at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Among his notable students were Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, Gyorgy Sandor, Erno Balogh, and Lili Kraus. After Bartók moved to the United States, he taught Jack Beeson and Violet Archer. he returned to composing with a ballet called The Wooden Prince (1914–16) and the String Quartet No. 2 in (1915–17), both influenced by Debussy. In March 1927, he visited Barcelona and performed the Rhapsody for piano Sz.26 with the Orquestra Pau Casals at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. In 1927–28, Bartók wrote his Third and Fourth String Quartets. Notable examples of this period are Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and Divertimento for String Orchestra (1939). The Fifth String Quartet was composed in 1934, and the Sixth String Quartet (his last) in 1939. In 1936 he travelled to Turkey to collect and study Turkish folk music. He worked in collaboration with Turkish composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun mostly around Adana. In 1940 Bartók emigrated to the US. Supported by a research fellowship from Columbia University, for several years, Bartók and his wife worked on a large collection of Serbian and Croatian folk songs in Columbia's libraries. In 1944, he was also commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin to write a Sonata for Solo Violin. In 1945, Bartok composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 and died shortly after before the scoring was finished.