The birth of mechanical song collecting is often symbolised by the photograph of Béla Bartók recording in the Slovak village of Dražovce. That was in 1907, eleven years after his compatriot Béla Vikár had begun recording bagpipers in the field, but the image still has archetypal force. Under Bartók’s supervision, a woman sings into the horn of a phonograph. Standing to attention is a line of other women, young girls, and middle-aged men – all in their Sunday best, awaiting their turn to sing. The importance of this communal moment is reflected in their unsmilingly serious faces: a new kind of history is being made.

None of those present left an account of the experience, but a girl named Susana Cirt described a similar one ten years later, as Bartók and his friend the Italian conductor Egisto Tango came to record in the Romanian village of Torjas:

In the same year, seventeen-year-old Róza Ökrös, who was to become one of Bartók’s most celebrated singers, was accosted by him while working in the fields, and asked if she would sing. ‘In the evening he came to our quarters and sat down on a worker’s case, with a night-light beside him,’ she recalled sixty years later.