These transcriptions are taken from a larger work, Bartókiana, for the newly-developed ‘Koltai guitar’ with single-string adjustable capos. The ability to alter the open string notes of the instrument creates a very flexible medium that can be adapted to Béla Bartók’s unmistakable musical language with its chromatic and often highly dissonant harmony. In any process of transcription the notion of remaining ‘faithful’ to the original is difficult, if not unhelpful, to maintain. Over the course of these four pieces Bartók’s originals, whilst always recognisable, move further from their familiar forms. The Flute of the Slovak Shepherd, from For Children, is an attempt at the closest guitar transcription possible; Arab Song, from 44 Duos for Two Violins, introduces passages of silence partly to facilitate the re-setting of capos but also as a deliberate challenge to the whirling energy of the piece; Romanian Christmas Carols is an abridgement of Bartók’s medley of piano arrangements in which each carol is played once only; finally, in the eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs only the atonal interludes are included in my transcription and silence features here to a greater extent than previously. The decision to transcribe Bartók’s folk arrangements was made to try and mirror his polyglot ideals in our own increasingly troubled times (perhaps not yet as troubled and war-torn as Bartók’s own but still with disturbing and tragic similarities). For Bartók, folk music was not only a means of studying cultures in isolation but investigating the productive way cultures interact to produce new musical hybrids; I see such thinking as an antidote of sorts to the increasingly aggressive and paranoid separatism and individualism characterising much of the world today.