8. CARPATHIANS I: HUNGARIANS AND RUMANIANS

The Hungarian (Magyar) people are culturally unique in the Carpathian region. Descended from Central Asians who invaded the Pannonian plain about a thousand years ago (as part of the overall Mongol expansion), they are linguistically related to the Turks and Finns. They are culturally related to the Mari and Chuvash peoples of Russia. The great composer and pedagogue Zoltan Kodaly demonstrated that the intrinsic nature of Hungarian folksong is Central Asian. Other influences on Hungarian music are numerous. Rom (Gypsy) dance music had a profound effect on Hungarian composers for about two hundred years. Kodaly recognized that understanding Hungarian music culture would be an enormous undertaking, requiring the ‘unlearning’ of some of his classical training. Hungarian bagpipers, for instance, did note think of the pitches produced by the chanter pipe as having letter or number designations. Each note, or more specifically, each hole on the chanter had a name, such as ‘flea-hole’, ‘shouting-hole’, or ‘screamer-hole’. He found that peasant musicians might sing a tune quite differently than they would play it, but insist that “it’s the same tune”. Rumanians are also culturally unique. Their Latin-based language indicates that they are descended from the inhabitants of the Roman colony of Dacia. Their wedding customs and folk poetry are more archaic than those found in the contiguous Latin cultural area. Their music is typically lively and rich, blending Turkish and Slavic sounds with ancient Latin roots. One highly evolved musical art is the lament, sung by women at the grave of a departed family member. Traditionally, the ability to improvise a poetically and musically cohesive lament was prized as a sign of deep familial bonding. During the 1920s and 1930s, when nationalism was at its pitch, Rumanians seemed to be Re-Latinizing themselves. Thousands of word of Turkish and Slavic origin were dropped from dictionaries, to be replaced by ‘designed’ words patterned on Italian or French. Things Latin, even Latin American, were craved and absorbed. One of the most interesting recordings I’ve ever heard is that of a Tango band in Bucharest in the interwar period. Compared to the way French and American contemporaries interpreted the tango, these musicians were truly faithful to the Argentine essence of the music, except for an occasional slide guitar solo.