Jewish and Roma folk music from the Carpathian basin - program of the Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year

Jewish and Roma folk music from the Carpathian basin

Concert series at Fonó Music Hall, a program of the Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year

The Hungarian Heritage House launches a concert series in the spirit of the Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year. Starting in September every fortnight another band will be our guest from Transylvania, the Kárpátalja / Subcarpathia region, the historical Upper Hungary and present day Hungary. The traditional musicians performing are chosen from the Utolsó Óra / Last Hour program (1997-2001). The series presents folk musicians whose music takes its inspiration from the Jewish and Roma folk music tradition, and whose repertoire contains songs and tunes connected to the holocaust, the Roma culture or the Jewish musical tradition. We hope that through these Jewish and Roma songs memories of the past can be connected to the culture of the present, and these nightly events will facilitate remembering as well as prove that folk music is a continuity that lives on.

Each concert is followed by a dance house, where folk music can play its most important role: serve the dancers, just as it was traditional at community events at village gatherings.

The concert series is supported by the Hungarian Holocaust - 2014 Memorial Commission (http://holokausztemlekev2014.kormany.hu/civil-alap-2014)

The opening event of the series will take place 10th September 2014 at Fonó Music Hall.

Guests:

Jóska Csernavec and his band from Técső (Kárpátalja / historical Upper Hungary)

The Técsö Band – playing the traditional Rusin music of the Máramarosians, the “unknown land” – is one of the best-known bands of this crown town, which lies on the upper part of the river Tisza. Their diverse repertoire – because of the strong interethnic influence – features local Romanian, Gipsy, Jewish, Russian and Hungarian songs. 
Beside the violin, their instruments are the bayan (or the button accordion), the small tsymbaly (cimbalom) hanging from the neck, and the drum with a cymbal. They regularly play at weddings, funerals and other events of the Rusin community, for example when celebrating the herding of livestock, on the „day of the bull”, during shearing, at Christmas, or on name days.  

Mihai Emil, Buza (Mezőség region, Transylvania)

Mihai Emil was born in 1958 in a village named Buza (Mezőség region). He learnt to play the violin at an early age, and immersed himself in the repertoire of the region’s traditional music. Mihail Emil plays regularly at weddings, and at other gatherings, his music has been preserved on numerous recordings. Living in Szamosújvár for decades, his repertoire has been enriched by the Romanian and Roma melodies that are characteristic of the Tóvidék and popular in Transylvanian towns. Within the Final Hour project he was recorded playing with another "primate" also from Búza, but now he is the only "primate" who is still with us.

The Final Hour program

The expert collecting of Hungarian folk music started at the end of the 19th century. The most famous expert collectors, Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók were followed by László Lajtha, György Martin (the fathers of expert collecting); and later their disciples and followers continued their work. The dance house movement of the 70s gave a new momentum to collecting, so by today a huge amount of recordings, videos, photos, and written folklore documents has become available. However, these projects were carried out rather randomly, so by the middle 90s numerous regions and villages remained where no recordings were made but where a number of musicians whose work and music was still not recorded could still be found.

The last generation that could take over the music culture of the peasants at an early age - before World War II, and the tragic changes that followed it - was born in the 1920s and 1930s. From the prespective of traditional instrumental folk music we are truly in the final hour. Within the Final Hour project of Fonó Music Hall (between September 1997 and December 2001) 1200 hours of music were recorded with still active traditional village folk musicians.

The project focused especially on collecting music from different nationalities. The result is that a large number of recordings is Romanian, Roma, Saxon, Jewish, Polish, Rusin, Hucul, Serbian, Croatian, Bunyevác and Sokác. On many occasions previously unknown tunes, songs were discovered that were born in periods of peaceful cohabitations of different nationalities, and laments preserving and remembering the horrors of the Holocaust also came to the researchers attention.

And so we have decided to invite and bring to Budapest for a concert series ago those bands of the Final Hour project of 13 years who can play Roma and Jewish folk music. The aim of this series is to show those elements of Jewish and Roma culture that are still preserved despite the Holocaust.