Didrik Schiele:

>I would love to hear...how [Bartok] represents "the new road"
>vs. "the old road" in music history...

That way of describing his music is new to me but I will take a stab at
it.  Bartok, in part at least because of his folk music studies, tended
to adopt the modal scales common in that kind of music, as did Vaughan
Williams in England, leaving diatonic scales behind.  You will not see his
works identified by keys, and he did not shy from using dissonance.  His
sonorities and instrumental textures are lean and fresh rather than lush
or heavy.  His rhythms are excitingly energetic and often slashing, like
Stravinsky's, and his melodies are on the angular side, to say the least.
But his slow movements are often hushed and as hauntingly beautiful as any
ever written.  And in such works as his Dance Suite and Roumanian Dances
he seems almost the heir of Brahms and Dvorak with their Hungarian and
Slavonic Dances, so the break with the past can be exaggerated, even though
in general he represents the high modern period.  His work has a great
range.

Jim Tobin