humusic1-4, Exercise 1: What they discovered

Model answer (check the details):

By recording singers in villages with the phonograph, Bartók and Kodály found that the oldest Hungarian folk songs had their own features: pentatonic and modal melodies, free or varied rhythm and distinctive forms. These were quite different from the verbunkos and csardas that Liszt, Brahms and the cafe bands had made famous.

How it changed the idea of "Hungarian music": the "Hungarian style" that Europe knew turned out to be mostly a nineteenth-century urban style, while the peasant tradition lay underneath it and was little known. The pair also found similar and related tunes among Slovak, Romanian and other neighbours, which complicated narrow national claims about folk music.

The result was a new, research-based picture of Hungarian music, which they then used in their own composing and in education (check how far scholars accept each part of their account).