Hungarian Folk Music I. / Magyar Népzene I.

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1969

Label: Qualiton

In co-operation with Unesco. / Unesco kooprodukció.

From the collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian Ethnographic Museum. / A Magyar Tudományos Akadémia És A Néprajzi Múzeum Anyagából.

76 pages booklet (Hungarian,English,German and Russian) - musical examples, lyrics, photos and notes.

The edition of the Collection of Hungarian Folk Music – Corpus Musicae Popularis Hungaricae - , which had been originally prepared for publication by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály in the early thirties, was practically started fifteen years ago, when the first volume of the serial work appeared. With the 1966 edition of the fifth volume we regard as having been published the substantial part of the tunes attached to popular customs. The first volume of tunes not attached to, i.e. independent of, such customs is likely to be passed over to the printers by the end of this current year. With this the editing of the major part of the material started, we have every reason to hope that the enterprise that envisages a full-scale representation of the Magyar ethnomusicological collection will be successfully completed in the foreseeable future.

Already thiry years ago it was thought necessary by members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences that a choice selection of Hungarian folk music be made heard and appreciated from authentical recordings. And thanks to those four pioneer records published by the Academy in 1937, and to a subsequent coproduction of more than one hundred discs by the Hungarian Ethnographic Museum and the Hungarian Radio, valuable treasures have been saved from oblivion, indeed. However rich the material presented on these discs was, still the plan underlying their publication had not been such as would have enabled the general public to gather a reliable, comprehensive view of the Hungarian folk music as a whole. Moreover, the number of discs was rather restricted, this being the second reason why that series could not cope with the task that would have involved on it from so exquisite preliminaries as were the A Magyar Népdal (The Hungarian Folk Song) published by Bartók in 1924 or A Magyar Népzene (Folk Music of Hungary), by Kodály, 1937 (together with a collection of examples compiled by Lajos Vargyas in 1952).

Decisive is the influence the enormous social changes in our era have exercised on the status and circumstances of the Magyar folk music. Traditional music is shrinking from day to day to ever-narrower territories. Parallel to this, the musical erudition of the Hungarian masses is making a shift – mainly owing to Kodály’s efforts – towards the use of written notes. Thus we have to face another pressing task: the extant stock of traditional folk music should be selected so as to constitute a complete whole in illustration of the above-mentioned monographs by Bartók and Kodály. The 1964 Conference of the International Folk Music Council held in Budapest brought an opportunity for us to indicate what we would like to achieve in this line: our disc published for the occasion under the name of Hungarian Folk Music yields examples, for information’s sake, of each distinct dialect area. It has been made feasible by the Hungarian Recording Company that this introductory survey be followed by serial sets of four units each, by means of which the material will be broken down to particular details. There will be no difference as regards the arrangement of material in the various sets: the first disc invariably represents tunes of the ancient layers, the second, tunes bearing general European marks on them and tunes of the new style, the third disc gives instrumental music while the fourth one, tunes relating to pupular customs. Each set contains tunetypes of one or another typically delimited region, yet with a view to the special requirement that each set in itself might render a comprehensive survey of the Magyar folk music as a whole. (For more details concerning the particular tunetypes the readers are referred to Zoltán Kodály’s A Magyar Népzene.

It goes without saying that what we here offer is by no means regarded as a reflection of a uniformly extant music of the entire Hungarian nation; it is rather sung by some particular groups of age or territory in the country.

The old kind of musical performance is mostly encountered under the subsurface strata of everyday life. Nowadays people hardly sing at work, dance or walk, neither do they perform traditional songs at family meetings. If they still perform such a piece, whether instrumental or vocal, it is mostly due to lengthy entreaties and questionings on the part of the collector. It is remarkable how easier the re-settlers from Bukovina, Moldavia or Transylvania can be made to commit themselves than those who have been living here from their birth. It is a happy circumstance that when a performance is played back from the tape-recorder, as if heard back from the radio, often such singers are induced to produce their art as would anyway be lost for ever from the point of view of folklore collection. It goes along with the exceptional instances if laments are sung by unsophisticated performers at a death case, or songs at weddings (on which occasions old-type tunes are still passed on to the young); similar is the ranking of the instrumental performances that take place now and then at one or another of the scattered farmsteads in the Great Plains, and in this category should we class the material that have been preserved of found to be extant in popular religious songs.

Some of the tunes or stylistical features are no more extant in the living practice of the present time. These could only be represented by making use of the discs of Pátria recorded some thirty or fourty years ago. Reference is always made to Pátria recording in such cases. Anyway, only such particulars of the process of collecting or circumstances of recording have been added as seem absolutely necessary for a general information on the selected piece.

With a view to modern requirements we sought to publish possibly the full texts of the songs so as to make obvious all instances of ad libitum formation, or free variation – or the lack of these – as may occur during performance. In order to render the tunes easier to recognize, we have given each of them in a sketchy notation (transposing them, as is usual in our publications, to one common closing note, with the sole exception of a violin-tune series – III/A/3 a-b-c-d – written down by Bartók). Thus both the individual characteristics and the rhythmical influence of the words on the tune are made more conspicuous than by any circumferential explanatory notes. The English translation strives to give a word-for-word interpretation of the original meaning.

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