Music of Hungary

Hungary has made many contributions to the fields of folk, popular and classical music. Hungarian folk music is a prominent part of the national identity, and continues to play a major part of the Hungarian music scene ^[1]. Hungarian folk music has been influential in neighboring countries like southern Poland, Romania and Slovakia; southern Slovakia and the Romanian region of Transylvania are also home to large numbers of Hungarians, who have brought with them their music ^[2]. Hungarian folk music is especially strong and traditional in style in the southwest part of Transdanubia, near the border with Croatia, and the Szabolcs-Szatmár area ^[3]. The Busójárás Carnival in Mohács is also a major spot for roots-based music, formerly featuring the long time and well-regarded Bogyiszló orchestra ^[4].

Characteristics

Hungarian music is unique in all of Europe in its status as a Finno-Ugric musical country; the collector Kodály having identified individual songs that "apparently date back 2500 years" and are shared with the Mari people of Russia ^[5]. Shared characteristics include the pentatonic scale and a descending pattern, which creates a distinctive sound. Hungarian music is "highly distinctive", according to world music author Simon Broughton, even "down to the Hungarian language, which is invariably stressed on the first syllable, lending a strongly accented dactylic rhythm to the music" ^[6]. Musician and musical theorist Béla Bartók, probably the most internationally famous Hungarian musician, has studied the similarities between Hungarian and Turkish folk music.

Folk music

Main article: Hungarian folk music

Hungarian folk music was first recorded in 1895 by Béla Vikár, setting the stage for Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály's pioneering work ^[7]. Modern Hungarian folk music began its history with the Habsburg Empire in the 18th century, when central European influences became paramount, including a "regular metric structure for dancing and marching instead of the free speech rhythms of the old style ^[8]. Folk music at that time consisting of village bagpipers who were replaced by string-based orchestras of the Gypsy, or Roma people ^[9].

The Roma orchestras became very well-known throughout Europe, and were frequently thought of as the primary musical heritage of Hungary, as in Franz Liszt's Hungarian Dances and Rhapsodies, which used Hungarian Roma music as representative of Hungarian folk music ^[10]. Hungarian Roma music is often represented as the only music of the Roma, though multiple forms of Roma music are common throughout Europe and are unrelated to Hungarian forms. Hungarian nationalist composers, like Bartók, rejected the conflation of Hungarian and Roma music, studying the rural peasant songs of Hungary; however, Simon Broughton has claimed that Roma music is "no less Hungarian and... has more in common with peasant music than the folklorists like to admit" ^[11]. Aside from the Roma and the ethnic Hungarians, Hungary's musical heritage includes the vibrant Serbian traditions of the communities of Pomáz and Szentendre ^[12]. The ethnic Csángó Hungarians of Moldavia's Seret Valley have moved in large numbers to Budapest, and become a staple of the local folk scene with their distinctive instrumentation using flutes, fiddles, drums and the lute ^[13].

Verbunkos

Main article: Verbunkos

In the 19th century, verbunkos was the most popular style in Hungary. This was a kind of rhythmic dance music, which consisted of a slow dance that was followed by a swifter dance; this dichotomy, between the slower and faster dances, has been seen as the "two contrasting aspects of the Hungarian character" ^[14]. Verbunkos was originally played at recruitment ceremonies to convince young men to join the army, and was performed, as in so much of Hungarian music, by Roma bands ^[15]. One verbunkos tune, the "Rákóczi Song" became a march that was a prominent part of compositions by both Liszt and Hector Berlioz.

Many of the biggest names in modern Hungarian music are the verbunkos-playing Lakatos family, including Sándor Lakatos and Roby Lakatos ^[16]. The violinist Panna Czinka was among the most celebrated musicians of the 19th century, as was the Roma bandleader János Bihari, known as the "Napoleon of the fiddle" ^[17].

Roma music

Main article: Roma music

Though the Roma are primarily known as the performers of Hungarian styles like verbunkos, they have their own form of folk music that is largely without instrumentation, in spite of their reputation in that field outside of the Roma community ^[18]. Though without instruments, Roma folk musicians use sticks, tapped on the ground, rhythmic grunts and a technique called oral-bassing which vocally imitates the sound of instruments ^[19]. Some modern Roma musicians, like Ando Drom, Romanyi Rota and Kalyi Jac have added modern instruments like guitars to the Roma style, while Gyula Babos' Project Romani has used elements of avant-garde jazz ^[20].

Nóta

Main article: Nóta

Bihari and others after his death helped invent the nota, a popular form written by composers like Lóránt Fráter, Árpád Balázs, Pista Dankó, Béni Egressy, Márk Rózsavölgyi and Imre Farkas. Rózsavölgyi's invention of the csárdás makes him especially important. Verbunkos, nóta and csárdás are sometimes collectively called cigányzene.

Táncház

Main article: Táncház

Táncház (dance house) is a form of dance music which first appeared in the 1970s as a reaction against state-supported homogenized folk music. They have been described as a "cross between a barn dance and folk club" ^[21], and generally begin with a slow tempo verbunkos or Lad's Dance, followed by swifter czardas dances. Czardas is a very popular Hungarian folk dance that comes in many regional varieties ^[22], and is characterized by changes in tempo. Táncház began with the folk song collecting of musicians like Béla Halmos and Ferenc Sebő, who collected rural instrumental and dance music for popular, urban consumption ^[23], along with the dance collectors György Martin and Sándor Timár. The most important rural source of these songs was Transylvania, which is actually in Romania but has a large ethnic Hungarian minority ^[24]. The instrumentation of these bands, based on Transylvanian and sometimes the southern Slovak Hungarian communities, included a fiddle on lead with violin and bowed bass guitar, sometimes including a cimbalom as well ^[25].

Many of the biggest names in modern Hungarian music emerged from the táncház scene, including Muzsikás and Márta Sebestyén. Other bands include Vujicsics, Jánosi, Téka and Kalamajka, while singers include Éva Fábián and András Berecz. Famous instruments include the fiddler Csaba Ökrös, cimbalomist Kálmán Balogh, violinist Félix Lajkó (from Subotica in Serbia) and multi-instrumentalist Mihály Dresch ^[26].

Classical music

Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály are two of Hungary's most famous composers, known for using folk themes in their music. Bartók collected folk songs from across Eastern Europe, including in Romania and Slovakia ^[27]. Kodály was more nationalistic in his interest in creating a distinctively Hungarian style ^[28]

Music festivals and venues

Budapest, the capital of Hungary, is one of the best places to go in Hungary to hear "really good folk music", says world music author Simon Broughton ^[29]. The city is home to an annual folk festival called Táncháztalálkozó (Meeting of the Dance Houses), which is a major part of the modern music scene ^[30].

Samples

• Download recording of "Kicsi fülemüle dalol" ("A small nightingale singing"), a cappella Hungarian-American folk music from the Library of Congress' California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collection; performed by Mary Gaidos on January 3, 1940 in Oakland, California

References

• Broughton, Simon. "A Musical Mother Tongue". 2000. In Broughton, Simon and Ellingham, Mark with McConnachie, James and Duane, Orla (Ed.), World Music, Vol. 1: Africa, Europe and the Middle East, pp 159-167. Rough Guides Ltd, Penguin Books. ISBN 1-85828-636-0
• "A Concise History of Hungarian music". Bence Szabolcsi. September 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)

Notes

1. ^ Broughton, pg. 159
2. ^ Broughton, pg. 159
3. ^ Broughton, pg. 161
4. ^ Broughton, pg. 161
5. ^ Broughton, pg. 160
6. ^ Broughton, pg. 159
7. ^ Broughton, pg. 160
8. ^ Broughton, pg. 160
9. ^ Broughton, pg. 160
10. ^ Broughton, pg. 160
11. ^ Broughton, pg. 161
12. ^ Broughton, pg. 164
13. ^ Broughton, pg. 160
14. ^ Broughton, pg. 160
15. ^ Broughton, pg. 160
16. ^ Broughton, pg. 161
17. ^ Broughton, pg. 161
18. ^ Broughton, pg. 161
19. ^ Broughton, pg. 161
20. ^ Broughton, pg. 161
21. ^ Broughton, pg. 163
22. ^ Broughton, pg. 163
23. ^ Broughton, pg. 163
24. ^ Broughton, pg. 163
25. ^ Broughton, pg. 163
26. ^ Broughton, pg. 159
27. ^ Broughton, pg. 159
28. ^ Broughton, pg. 159
29. ^ Broughton, pg. 161
30. ^ Broughton, pg. 164