Music Teaching Tips : Missouri Music Teachers Association

by Rebecca Ashe

Published in the Fall 2006 issue of MMTA Notes

Liberalism and Nationalism were two words on the lips of every Hungarian middle and upper class society member in the mid to late 19th Century. The Hungarian Revolution of 1848-1849 abolished serfdom, and allowed Hungary to embrace the values of liberty and equality from the French Revolution. The Austro-Hungarian Compromise, signed in 1867, established Franz Josef I as monarch of both Hungary and Austria. Hungary was granted an independent government, ruling local and national affairs. This situation created a new constitutional order, which was controlled by the aristocracy and middle nobility. A new sense of nationalism flourished in Budapest, with rapid growth of varied cultures of Germans, Jews, Hungarians, and Gypsies living in close proximity. Hungarian became the official language spoken over German. Philosophical questions arose about what it truly meant to be Hungarian.

The music also was caught in this new flourish of nationalism. Foreigners entering Budapest were seen as Nationals if they spoke Hungarian fluently. Gypsy bands playing Romani folk music grew very popular. A particular style of "Romani folk song", called Magyar nota, developed and was performed in the city. Though it claimed itself to be pure Hungarian folk music, this was truly a concoction of the nineteenth century city-dwellers. With so many foreigners living in Budapest, what was termed folk music in the city had truly become exploited – only a shell of its origins. In Budapest, the Gypsy bands often were comprised of Jews, and not Gypsies at all. Foreign composers and upper-class society from Western Europe fell in love with the "exoticism" of this Hungarian National music and returned home to copy it. Franz Liszt presents a good example in his set of Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano. They, as well as other examples of Western Art Music, are simply an imitation and an idealization of what composers thought Hungarian National music sounded like.

Magyar-nota found its way into the rural communities in Hungary. It was taught and sung in oral tradition, as the old style of music was learned. To rural communities, Magyar-nota was simply the "new style" of folk music. It was not until the Twentieth Century that the true nature of Romani, or Gypsy music was uncovered by composers and ethnomusicologists Bela Bartok (1881-1945) and Zoltan Kodaly (1882-1967). Bartok grew up in Hungary and as a youth was an avid Hungarian nationalist. Bartok described in letters and essays that, when the nationalist movement reached him, it drew his attention to studying Hungarian folk music. He later went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest.

However, it wasn't long until Bartok saw that ethnic purity and Hungarian music were at seemingly opposite ends. Also, the Gypsies incorporated Magyar nota into their traditional style Verbunkos (traditionally a gypsy song, usually performed under duress, that gypsies performed and danced to entice young men to join the military), thus confusing pure Hungarian music even further.

Early in the Twentieth Century, Bartok and Kodaly, the son of rural musicians, did the unthinkable. They, along with a large wax cylinder recorder, entered the Hungarian countryside to locate pure Hungarian folk song. Transylvania was one of the areas to which they travelled. The population was comprised of mostly Romanians and Gypsies, the minority being Hungarian. Interestingly, Nationalism in Transylvania – equality before the law, the abolition of servitude, and the equal treatment of all confessions and races – was looked on by the peasants with extreme skepticism, completely unlike their fellow countrymen in Budapest. The countryside was dominated by Hungarian nobles, who were not interested in granting personal liberty or political freedom to peasants. Nationalism was dangerous, as it made the Hungarian nobility aware that Hungarians formed a minority in the country. Their agriculture system still clung to the medieval three field rotation system. The mass of the peasants were still truly serfs by status. The nobles and estate owners tried to improve their position by demanding excessive corvee labor, but the Transylvanian economy had suffered almost beyond repair – the number of craftsmen in Transylvania had declined in the early nineteenth century, and roads and transportation were poor if not impassible in places.

The music that Bartok and Kodaly found surprised them. Instead of highly passionate music, they found practical folk songs sung without much emotion. Peasants learned, sang, and danced this music for various rituals regarding natural cycles, such as harvest or death. The lives of Hungarian peasants was difficult at best, and the ethnomusicologists found themselves collecting music of poverty, hardship, and short life span. Very interesting to note is that Hungarian peasants sang very few lullabies to babies. Because the soil was so hard to work, the babies often fended for themselves in the fields until it was time to nurse. Any songs that women sang to their children were often folk songs about nature, not specific to children. Recording this music was intimidating, and obtrusive, to the lives of the people whose music Bartok and Kodaly were interested in collecting. Imaginably, to have a man enter a rural village, wearing a suit and carrying a large recording device, wanting friends or family to sing a folksong into a microphone, feelings of the absurd and of skepticism must have been the norm. The two musicians, running into such problems, later assigned their students from the Academy, to collect folksongs from their own villages. As the students were known in the village, shyness and skepticism were not as much of a problem.

Not surprisingly, Hungarian and Western European Society wasn't at all interested in pure Romani music. They preferred listening to the contrived notions of gypsy music that they heard in the operas and other popular musical constructs of the time. Society found the unmetered, tonally challenging music that was ornamented in ways that they were not used to hearing as strident.

Bartok and Kodaly did much to bridge the gap between true Romani folk music and Western European art music in their compositions and contributions to education. Though the collection of this music was an interference to the lives of the peasants, and an annoyance to a society that enjoyed a caricature of its own musical style, collecting this folk music was an essential part of keeping the ethnic colors, so to say, from blending into grey. Without Bartok's and Kodaly's collection of folk music, Hungary's national image would have blended into a Viennese pastry yellow. Thankfully, time and cataloguing of Hungarian folk traditions collected from the two musicologists and their students, have allowed Westerners to differentiate between the pure Romani folk music and that of the Austro-Hungarian construction.

Rebecca Ashe, flutist, earned her Bachelor degree in Applied Music (flute) at the Eastman School of Music, where her principal teacher was Bonita Boyd. She earned her Master of Musical Arts from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, studying under Mary Posses. In 1998, she was the only American and one of four flutists worldwide to be chosen for Trevor Wye's prestigious one year course in Kent, England. Other major teachers have included William Bennett and Karl Kraber. She is currently a candidate for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is adjunct professor of Music Theory at Park University, and published music specialist at the Toon Shop in Prairie Village, Kansas.

posted by Brent Hugh at 9/16/2006
permanent link to article: 19th Century Hungary - Romani Folk Music and Nationalism

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