Music Professor Carl Leafstedt, Ph.D., sweats at the wheel of a bright yellow Penske moving truck, snaking along a sweltering stretch of interstate in the Florida panhandle.
The situation is serious enough that his car radio (usually buzzing with a podcast) is off, and he’s driving 20 under the speed limit as pickups, horse trailers, and RVs overtake him. But Leafstedt isn’t sweating from the heat of the Gulf. There’s an overloaded cargo of musical treasure onboard that’s been hidden for 70 years, and he can’t lose it now.
This pile of records and historic master tapes, along with thousands of books, music scores, letters, and other artifacts, represents the life work of Peter Bartók, son of Béla Bartók, one of the greatest (if not the greatest) performer-composers in 20th-century classical music. Peter, a leading talent in his own right as a sound engineer, recorded and mastered sessions from some of the best musicians of 1950s New York and London, many of whom performed the very first recordings of his father’s compositions, all for the Bartók Records label.
“This collection is a godsend to the music community,” says Leafstedt, who’s received a grant from the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles to catalog, study, and preserve the collection. “This is such a rare chance to have all the original production materials in one place from such a prominent label.”
Leafstedt, a music historian at Trinity University, was given the opportunity to purchase the collection by the Peter Bartók estate following a lengthy legal process after Peter’s death in 2020. The estate heirs gave the nod to Leafstedt for his extensive writing on the Bartók legacy, especially his book, A Thorn in the Rosebush: The American Bartók Estate and Archives During the Cold War, 1946-67.
Béla Bartók, a brilliant pianist and composer whose fascination with the folk heritage of his Hungarian homeland transformed him into an icon in the 1930s, spent his last years as a political refugee in New York City, dying in 1945. Peter, his son, emigrated separately to the U.S. from Budapest, Hungary, as a teenager, then launched Bartók Records in 1949. Even while grieving his father’s death, this work allowed Peter the chance to collaborate with first-rate musicians who revered his father’s music.
“People have been fighting over the Bartók family legacy since the Cold War,” Leafstedt says. “All sorts of factions have been involved, from the former Hungarian communist government to industry professionals—very painful to a lot of people, especially the surviving family members.”
With these clouds looming, Peter Bartók eventually took much of his work (particularly first edition recordings of his father’s compositions) and became a recluse for decades. He retreated from New York to a secluded home on the Florida Gulf Coast, north of Tampa. Surrounded by moss-covered trees, the reclusive sound engineer puttered with his recordings collection and hid from the world.
Now, Leafstedt and his Trinity student researchers finally can start unpacking these musical treasures.
The first challenge is reassembling the collection, stored by a “brilliant sound engineer who saved everything,” Leafstedt says.
Here, student researchers like Jake Cipolla ’26 and Greta Shadle ’26 come in handy.
Shadle, a linguistic whiz who majored in Russian and history, has combed through written materials compiled in the Bartók gift. Now in graduate school, Shadle wants to become an archivist for Slavic language materials, so the chance to check out a collection of rare books in 17 different languages, including several Slavic ones, was “too perfect to pass up.”
“I’ve worked on organizing the collection and making it more searchable, and we’re really looking to see if somebody signed a page here or wrote notes in the margins there,” she says. “Every day you find some really interesting artifacts.”
Once, Shadle even found pressed flowers lingering between two pages. For whom they were intended, readers may never know.
Cipolla, who majored in music education as an undergrad and is now pursuing a master’s in teaching at Trinity, jumped at the opportunity to work with music that he can physically thumb through on a shelf.
Under the GRAMMY Museum grant, Cipolla organized the collection’s 700 tapes, most with only a few words from Peter Bartók on the spine to guide decisions. At night, Cipolla spent hours researching the label's early history.
“This is a surreal feeling, to touch things, letters, records that are from the 1920s and probably earlier,” he says.
Peter Bartók was a man of few words, Cipolla says, which makes finding insights into his personality all the more touching. “He was meticulous with his notes, and he didn’t like giving out compliments. So, finding a note where he wrote, ‘Not bad!’ that must have been a day when someone really impressed him.”
These touchingly human discoveries will continue as Leafstedt’s work progresses. The next step will include rounding up more of the entire Peter Bartók estate, which remains somewhat scattered. Leafstedt's current collection represents a large bulk, but with Peter’s death, other fragments have begun to emerge, including one in Tucson, Arizona, and another in Vancouver, British Columbia. “We’re working on having them all assembled here in San Antonio,” Leafstedt says. “The collection has grown too big for my office.”
Leafstedt has also brought on Melissa Camp, Ph.D., visiting assistant music professor, as the official director of the Bartók Records collection.
"Camp's background in historic recording technology, which she studied for her dissertation at UNC-Chapel Hill, makes her a perfect fit for this collection," Leafstedt explains. "She worked with Greta and Jake this summer to organize the historic reel-to-reel recordings and prepare the inventory and discography we promised the GRAMMY Museum this summer." Leafstedt notes that funding from the Louis H. and Mary Patricia Stumberg Family Foundation makes Camp’s ongoing commitment to the Bartók Records project possible.
With any luck, Trinity University might soon have access to the world’s largest collection of Bartók originals.
“I don't think Trinity has ever had a collection like this, of an entire prominent record label with this type of history,” Leafstedt says. “If you’re excited about music history, we’re rebuilding a bit of it here in real time.”