Song, Instrument and Story

Song, instrument and story are the oral side of folk culture: things carried in memory and voice rather than in cloth or wood. This chapter covers folk song and how it was collected, the instruments that accompany it, the tales and legends told in villages, and the Kodály method that turned song into a way of teaching. The music itself is treated more fully in Hungarian Music; here the focus is the folk tradition. Names, dates and details are from general knowledge and flagged for checking.

Folk Song and Its Collecting

Hungarian folk song has several layers. Scholars often distinguish an older layer of songs with pentatonic melodies (check the terminology) from a newer layer of songs in more regular verse forms and popular styles. Songs belong to occasions: work, courtship, weddings, laments, soldiers' life, and the calendar customs of Chapter 6.

• Collecting. From the first years of the twentieth century Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály travelled to villages, recording singers on wax cylinders and writing the tunes down (check the dates and the number of songs collected). Their work, described in Hungarian Music, is the foundation of the modern study of the tradition.
• What they found. The collections showed that the "Hungarian songs" known from town salons and popular bands (check the term and its use) were often different from the older village repertoire, a distinction central to the record, revival and stage categories of Chapter 1.
• Archives. The recordings and notations are kept in research archives in Budapest and used by singers and teachers today (check the institution).

The Instruments

Each region has its own balance of instruments, and the band that plays at a táncház (Chapter 7) is a revival of village practice, adapted for the modern dance floor.

Folk Tales and Legends

Stories were told at the spinning room, at the table, and at the winter gatherings when work slowed. Hungarian folk tales include the familiar international types, such as the youngest son, the clever girl and the helpful animal, together with local figures and settings (check the classification).

• The Wondrous Stag. A legend in which the ancestors of the Hungarians, the brothers Hunor and Magor, chase a stag and find new lands. It is a founding legend rather than history (check the versions and the sources).
• Matthias the Just. Stories about King Matthias Corvinus (see Hungarian Architecture for his building) in which he goes among the people in disguise and judges fairly. The tales are folk memory, not record (check the king and the story).
• Regional legends. Local tales attached to hills, castles and springs, differing from village to village.

Ballads

Hungarian ballads are narrative songs, often short and dramatic, about love, betrayal, death, the supernatural and outlaws (the betyár, check the term). Transylvanian ballads, collected in the Hungarian-speaking villages there, are among the best known (check the examples). Like Scottish ballads, they survived in oral form and were gathered by collectors, then printed and sung again.

The Kodály Method

Zoltán Kodály argued that children should learn music through their own folk songs, sung from early childhood. The Kodály method (check the name and the details) uses folk song as the base of music teaching in schools, with relative solmization (the movable do, check), hand signs and singing in groups. Developed in Hungary in the mid-twentieth century, it was adopted widely abroad (check the countries and the current practice). It is one of the clearest cases of folk tradition feeding a formal education system.

Exercises