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There is a great affinity between Bartók’s scholarly works and that of the members of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv — established in 1900 and considered as the cradle of the discipline of ethnomusicology — both in their methods and philosophical outlook. Several publications of the Berlin scholars are extant in Bartók’s library. They exerted significant influence on Bartók’s folkloristic output, from the methods of transcription and analysis, to the publication of folk material. Bartók also had personal connections with two of the members of the school. He contacted the director of the institution, Erich von Hornbostel, in 1912, wanting to take part in the galvanoplastic preservation and exchange program, introduced in Berlin a few years earlier. Only ten of Bartók’s cylinders could be processed before the war broke out, putting an end to this effort. A few years later Hornbostel took on the publishing of Bartók’s monograph, Volksmusik der Rumänen von Maramureş in the series Sammelbände der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft . Bartók also met and corresponded with another outstanding member of the Berlin School of Ethnomusicology, Robert Lachmann, the chairman of the committee on sound recordings, in the work of which Bartók also participated in 1932 at the Congress of Arab Music in Cairo.
Benjamin Rajeczky very much influenced the famous Hungarian school of ethnomusicology. He was very successful in organizing international studies of European folk traditions, too. In Poland he was especially interested in laments (from 1962). He took part in the field work. Some examples of Polish laments were published in 1971 (Bielawski). Rajeczky took part in the International Congress "Musica Antiqua Europae Orientalis" in Bydgoszcz (1966). The classical themes ant methods of the Hungarian musicological school are also continued in Poland. International relations become so frequent that the ideas could freely cross national borders.
There are marked differences between Hungarian and American ethnomusicology in incentives, aims, interests, and methods. Hungarian research was based in the early twentieth century on study of musical form, while the Americans approached music in terms of social context and functions. However, Hungarians from the mid-1930s onward moved toward an increasing interest in the social aspects of folk music. Oszkár Dincsér, a lesser known researcher of Kodály's school, exemplifies this trend in his 1943 study of chordophone instruments in the Csík (in Romanian: Ciuc) County region of Transylvania Két csíki hangszer. Mozsika és gardon (Two instruments from Csík. Fiddle and gardon). A comparison with Alan P. Merriam's fundamental work The Anthropology of Music (1964) reveals that Dincsér's study includes almost every topic and approach set out by Merriam twenty years later. Although Dincsér's scholarly career ended with his emigration in 1944, he remains an important forerunner of musical anthropology.
Owing to its strong emotional effect, music plays a great role in experiencing and expressing self-identity. In Hungary, 19 th century compilers of folksong collections consciously professed the national value of their work, while they were embarrassed by the tonality of genuine folksongs, having an aversion to pentatonic tunes. In the early 20 th century, it was exactly this tonal world that attracted Bartók and Kodály and helped them to develop their own compositional style and create sovereign Hungarian music in opposition to German romanticism. Pentatony recognized in folk music aroused their interest in researching eastern, prehistoric connections and also inspired them to carry on the stylistic interpretation of the Hungarian folk music stock. Kodály based his music pedagogical conception on the acquisition of the musical mother tongue, first of all pentatonic folksongs, which he meant as a remedy against the identity crisis of the society. The role of pentatony as a vehicle of identity has been verified by new achievements of ethnomusicology which has explored the importance of the five-tone scale in the history of Hungarian folk music more thoroughly.
In 2004–2005 with the help of a Fulbright scholarship the author studied the folk music of two Native American tribes, the Dakota and the Navajo. The article presents the main characteristics of the Dakota folksongs (scales, range, rhythm, melodic movements) and their classification. The author calls the attention to the most characteristic similarities and differences between Dakota songs and the Turk-Mongolian folk music and shows a descending pentatonic “quintile-shift” melody group whose specific forms blossom in the Dakota, Mongolian, Hungarian and Cheremis-Chuvash folk music.
Abstract
Bartók collected folk music in Turkey in 1936, and his Turkish collection was published in 1976 almost simultaneously in Hungary and America, and in 1991 in Turkey. How Bartók's conclusions stand the test in the light of an examination on a larger Turkish material? I investigated this question in four of my books, and the detailed analysis points way beyond the scope of the present paper. This time I deal with a single melody, the No. 51 lament of Bartók's collection and with its larger Anatolian, Hungarian and other musical background. Can this melody be an important link between Hungarian and Anatolian folk music layers? If so, why did Bartók not realize this? Does Bartók's incredibly detailed way of transcription has practical benefits in the ethnomusicological research? Is the unique intonation of certain tones in some Anatolian and Hungarian laments accidental or do these tones show a consistent system? Can we find the musical form represented by this Turkish lament in the folk music of Turkic and other people; is yes, what kind of conclusion can be drown? Trying to find an answer to some of these questions I use the melodies and the results of my Turkish, Azeri, Karachay-Balkar, Kazakh, Mongolian and Kyrgyz researches of more then 7000 songs.
The trajectories of social actions comprising nature conservation and regional economic development in the Slovenian-Austrian-Hungarian tri-border area discussed in this paper are closely linked to the landscape of the Slovenian-Austrian-Hungarian border. Processual understanding bounds landscape to human activities and other non-human agents, all of whom constitute the landscape-in-the-making. The Őrség National Park and Goričko Landscape Park, as designated nature reserves, are subject to human influences through their protection and, as intrinsically objects of human agency, are rich sites of social production and interaction. The cross-border initiative of the Trilateral Goričko–Raab–Őrség Nature Park is analyzed through the politics of European integration and territorial cooperation in the peripheral regions and their financial programs. Through field research and interviews with social actors, the complexity of the obstacles that hinder the functioning and effective management of the actions of the proposed Trilateral Nature Park initiative and the ambivalent attitude of the inhabitants towards the actions of the three parks is observed.
In 1927, Europe marked the centennial of the death of one of its greatest composers, Ludwig van Beet ho ven. At the same time, Bosnia and Herzegovina within the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) was building the foundations of its musical institutions and trying to follow up with the more advanced cultural centers of the new state, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade. The main feature of Bosnian musical life of the time (1918–1941) pertains to the establishment of the new musical institutions such as the National Theater (Narodno pozorište) and the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra (Sarajevska filharmonija), the fundamental institutions of musical culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina even today. This paper aims at providing an insight into the presence of Beethoven’s works in concert repertoires in Sarajevo (1918–1941), especially of the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra but also to point out the special occasion of Beethoven’s anniversary in 1927. The Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra was the only musical institution of this kind, and the most important musical society for the development of musical culture of the time; consequently, the research is based on the analysis of the society’s concert repertoire and reviews from the daily newspapers.
The Slovene ballad Animals Bury the Hunter is an animal narrative song of jocular character. It tells of the burial of a hunter and of a funeral procession not composed of humans but wild animals (a bear, foxes, hares, a wolf, cranes and partridges, song birds, etc.) who seem to derive great joy from the event. The analysis of the song's 31 variants reveals the changes made to the song over the course of time, as it survived through different historical periods and spread throughout Slovenia. I attempt to show that the ballad was used as a model for painted beehive panels featuring the same motif. In addition to the analysis, I am concerned with the sociological and ethical elements of the ballad. The paper proposes at least three possible theses: 1. The song is part of the conception of a topsy-turvy world, where the roles and mutual relationships of people and animals are reversed in an ironic sociological view of the world. 2. The song is a critique of one class by another: peasants mocking hunters who belong to a different social stratum. 3. The song is a representation of “pre-Cartesian” times, when animals were not “mere machines” without feelings, to be treated by man as objects with no ethical significance. It points to the ethical aspects of the human treatment of animals.
After three decades of our personal, publicly conducted discussion with Ernő Lendvai, in 1999 at a conference organized in memory of Bence Szabolcsi, I raised again my objections related his theories. Since my lecture was given in Hungarian, and its printed version was published in Hungarian language (Muzsika 2000, Bartók-analitika 2003), I feel necessary to present some of my objetions on an international forum as well, with particular aspect to the fact that in the Bartók literature - in spite of serious criticism (Petersen, Gillies) - several analysts employ up to now Lendvai's theories in a servile way. My objections are focussed upon four points. 1. The extension of Riemann's three-function theory to the twelvetone system is a theoretical arbitrariness and an impasse. 2. The axis interpretation of the tonalities - by identification of polar keys - is in flat contradiction with Bartók's tonal thinking. 3. The pentatony interpreted as a golden section system is very much doubtful according basic experiences of the ethnomusicology. 4. The typical Bartókian chord structures - named by Lendvai α, β etc. - are phenomenologically correct, but their interpretation by Fibonacci figures is arbitrary, because the actual intervals represent another ratios.
