A Conversation with Members of the Budapest Folk Ensemble Orchestra

By Peter Anick

Just as the American folk music revival of the 1960's renewed urban
Americans' interest in their country's folk heritage, the Hungarian "dance
house" movement of the 1970's reacquainted urban Hungarians with the
traditional music and dances of the Hungarian villages. Through
instruction at dance houses and music camps, a new generation of
Hungarians has learned to dance the csárdás, the spirited couple dance
which was at the height of fashion some two hundred years ago. To provide
authentic live music for the dance houses, many urban musicians have
learned to play the traditional string music that accompanies the romantic
and fiery dances. The Budapest Ensemble, under the leadership of artistic
director Zoltán Zsuráfszki, has now brought the dance house to the stage
with its production of "Csárdás! The Tango of the East". Remaining true
to folk traditions, the production presents a dazzling selection of music
and dance from Central Europe through a series of play-party games that
relate a story. There's a men's dance competition, a romantic courtship
duet, a quest through the Carpathian Basin for the abducted bride, a
wedding – all accompanied by some of the wildest fiddling that has ever
been heard outside Hungary. The "village orchestra" in the production
features two violins, a viola, cymbalom (dulcimer) and double bass, along
with an occasional clarinet, bagpipes, jaw harp, drum, and an odd
cello-shaped stringed instrument beat with a stick!

I caught this Hungarian "Riverdance" when their world tour came to
Boston's Symphony Hall. After the show, I chatted with members of the
orchestra about Hungarian folk fiddle styles, the dance houses, and
village traditions. The conversation included first violinist István Papp
Gázsa, second violinist Álmos Gáspár, violist Péter Árendás and company
manager Gusztáv Takách. Péter and Gusztáv kindly took on the role of
translators.

Péter: We play traditional Hungarian folk music. So the main goal is to
play as traditional as possible. We learned this style of music in the
villages with all the Gypsy musicians that live in the villages in
Hungary. By "Hungary", we mean the Hungary as it was before the First
World War. It was larger then, and many Hungarian people live outside
today's Hungary. This includes Slovakia and Transylvania. For example,
Gázsa and Álmos, they are from Transylvania. So if we wanted to learn
this music, we had to find people in villages not only in Hungary but all
around Hungary. In Transylvania, the tradition has survived up till now.
If tomorrow you would go to Transylvania, you would find old musicians,
old fiddle players, old viola players or double bass players who learned
this music not from notes, but from his father, from his grandfather and
his great grandfather, and so on. We want to try to get this style of
music. In this style, the violin players play the melody. They are
improvising, meaning that we learn many many melodies and now we use them.
For example, "Csárdás! The Tango of the East" was a program of fixed
melodies, but if we played elsewhere, he (the first violin player) would
improvise one melody after another, as he wanted. He is the boss of the
group.

The viola playing is a different style than in classical music. I use
only three strings, and the three strings are in one level (i.e., the
bridge is flat). This is why I can play chords. I play only chords and
keep rhythm with my instrument. I don't play melody. There are many
different styles among west, east or middle Hungary. There are parts of
Transylvania, for example, where they only use major chords and that's a
very old style. Other parts use major chords, minor chords, seventh
chords.

Do you play all three strings at the same time?

Yes. Or if I play the other viola, the four string viola, I play either
two or three strings together.

Is the bridge flat on that one too?

Not as much. It's less curved than in classical music.

What are the notes of the strings?

The four-string viola is the same as in classical music. So the deepest
is C, then D and G and A. The three-string viola, I miss the C. So I
have only G, D and A, and the A is an octave lower. I play chords and
give the rhythm, together with the bass.

Now we are going to place a piece from middle Transylvania. It's a very
old style. In the village, the music goes with the dance. So the
musicians play, and mostly they start with some slow music and after,
faster and faster. There are couple dances for a man and a woman, a boy
and a girl, but there are other dances for only the men. There is a suite
of dances, most of the time.

Who decides when to change the speed of the dance?

The violin player, or the dancers. Somebody comes and says, "I want to do
it faster!" And he gives the rhythm, just like in the show. There is
constant communication between dancers and the violinist.

Each village has its own dance habits, but mostly it begins with a slow
part and it goes ever faster.

Would every village have its own tunes?

Yes. And sometimes they have the same melodies in the same region, but
every village has its own version. Different ways of ornamenting.

(Gázsa and Péter play a suite of dance tunes from the middle Transylvanian
village of Magyarszovát.)

That can last for hours. The people in the village want to dance. The
music starts, a very slow dance, it lasts a quarter hour. They are
singing. Everybody dances a slow dance. After a little, faster music,
they start dancing faster and faster. It lasts one hour, one and a half
hours.

For one dance?

Yes. They call it a couple dance. It's always the same couple that
dances together in this suite. They don't switch partners. It's not like
the Turks or Romanians or Bulgarians. They dance in circles or in lines.
The Hungarians dance in couples. Or the men alone.

It lasts one hour. After a little break, some men's dance. They dance
alone, to show off. Then another couple dance, and so on. A wedding
lasts two days, without sleeping for the musicians. Non-stop music. The
dancers can drink and sleep, no problem. The musicians don't stop.

Can you play in your sleep?

Yes! (laughter) And the musicians in the villages, or, for example, us,
we learned many hundreds of melodies and we use these melodies. What we
just played now, I didn't know what he (the violinist) will play. He
started, I listened to him. We've played for many years together, so just
one or two notes is enough for me to know what he is playing. That was an
old style from Transylvania, and we will now play another style from
Hungary, a new style.

Gusztáv: Now he is going to play on the four-string viola and you'll see
the difference in accompaniment.

Now would that first tune be considered a csárdás or not?

It was a slow csárdás. A csárda is an inn, a village inn. And every
dance which they danced in the inn was called a csárdás, a pub dance.
There are thousands of melodies.

Péter: Okay, now we'll play another style. It's not so old. It's from
the eighteenth century. The other one was much older, the melody and
style of playing. This one's from the northeast part of Hungary, called
Szatmár.

Gusztáv: This part was not so isolated during the history. It was much
more open, open to influences. The bands played not only for the peasants
but also for nobles. There were more influences, not only from geography
but also social.

Would the influences come from classical music?

Yes. From the cities. The villages were so isolated even thirty years
ago. There was no radio, television, no influence from outside. That's
why it could survive so long. No electricity.

Did people refer to the songs by name?

Most of them have texts, lyrics. The band would begin to play and most of
the people would sing. It's very complicated. We have the rhythm of each
song, we have six syllables or seven or nine, and we have a family of
lyrics. And whichever matches with the number of syllables, you can use
it and sing to this song.

So you can sing the same words to different melodies?

You can improvise, again, with the lyrics. Most of the people in the
village know many many lyrics. Most of them have stories, like a ballad.
Most of them are love songs, they can sing about soldier's lives,
recruiting songs, a variety of lyrics.

Songs for recruiting for the army?

Yes, two hundred years ago it was a new policy to recruit soldiers for the
Austria-Hungarian army. This was by playing music and drinking wine.
The recruiting official came with a band of musicians and that was the way
they recruited the peasants into the army. It was a big deal because once
they agreed, they went into the army for three, or ten, or twenty years.

(Gázsa and Péter, now joined by Álmos on second violin, play a slow and
fast csárdás from the Szatmár region of northeast Hungary.)

This is a "new" style csárdás. New style means two hundred years old!

So it is harmonically more complex. And the second violin is playing a
counterpoint?

Álmos: We are playing in thirds, but not always. When I want to play,
when it's most beautiful.

Do you improvise your accompaniment or do you have it worked out?

Gusztáv: He improvises. Gázsa is the leading violinist and he invents,
just as he is playing. So this is always a creative work. They can also
switch and then he (Álmos) leads.

Do you improvise during the show?

Péter: In the show, the roles are fixed. But for weddings, and dance
houses. Do you know about dance houses?

Please talk a little about dance houses.

Many people come together and enjoy dance houses, but not for pop music,
for folk music. They know the Hungarian folk dances and musicians know
Hungarian folk music and we enjoy it together. And, for example, some
dancers come and say, "Oh please now play for us some Transylvanian
music." So they call out some region, western part of Hungary or east
part. And now we start and play for an hour and they dance.

Gusztáv: The musicians are prepared for these different kinds of
requests. So if they are asked to play Transylvanian music from middle
Transylvania, they play this kind of music. But if they are asked to play
Gyimes, this requires the "hit gardon". (The hit gardon is a cello-shaped
percussion instrument with two thick strings that are beat with a stick,
and a thin string which is plucked.) They have this instrument there and
for this particular dance, they use this instrument. Or the bagpipe for
western Hungary. The most popular band is the strings – the violin,
viola, and double bass. You can find it almost all around Hungary. But
there are special instruments in special parts. For the very east part of
Hungary, the Gyimes, they know only the violin and the "hit gardon". The
north part is the bagpipe, or the west part. Those parts where the people
are very poor, they have no money to pay three, four, five musicians. If
they have less money, they only have one bagpiper. That was enough. Other
parts, where the people were not so poor, they can pay five musicians –
two violin players, viola, cymbalom, and double bass. So it depends on
the money.

Were any of the tunes you played in the concert tonight composed pieces,
where the composer is known?

No.

What is the relationship between city music, like the "Csardas of Monte",
and the music that you played?

Gusztáv: Nobody knows who invented it, so it goes back hundreds of years.
This is the definition of folk music in Hungary – you don't know the
composer. This is why you find one variation in one region and another in
another region. They don't learn it from notes. It goes from one violin
to the other. With Monte and Brahms, it is composed music. Monte was an
Italian, Brahms a German. They must have heard it somewhere in a village
and they composed it for themselves. The urban Gypsies mostly play
composed music. They don't even know this kind of music. As we told you
before, in folk music you can switch the lyrics from one song to another,
but in composed music it doesn't work. Once you have composed music, this
is the lyrics.

Péter: In traditional Hungarian folk songs, the texts are like very
beautiful poems.

Can you talk about the different kinds of ornamentation that you use?

(Gázsa demonstrates by playing a highly ornamented version of a slow dance
from Szék, in the Transylvanian Heath. Many notes are decorated with a
tight trill. Open strings are occasionally bowed along with a grace note
on the string below, fingered so as to produce a note roughly a half step
below the open string. Gázsa then plays the same melody as it might be
heard in Szatmár. This time, there are no trills. Instead, glissando,
typically in the form of downward slides, is liberally applied to the
longer melody notes.)

Were most of these tunes played by Gypsies in these regions?

Gusztáv: In ninety percent of the cases, yes. There are peasant musicians
as well, although dominantly it is in Gypsy hands. They are fun-loving
people and they didn't like to work. It was easier to earn their living
playing music at the weddings and such. The village inhabitant, he had to
go to work in the fields. He didn't have time for playing music and
having fun in this way. The Gypsy had time.

So the Gypsy learned the music of the peasant.

Yes. But they played traditional, authentic Hungarian folk music. There
is a great difference between village Gypsy and urban Gypsy. The urban
Gypsy dresses in red, very sharp. The village Gypsy, it's very simple.

Péter: Like us in the program. Our clothes are very simple clothes, like
village Gypsies.

Do the villagers and Gypsies have a good relationship?

Yes, they are on good terms. This is the village Gypsies' main job, so it
means they have to know everything about the music and about the people in
the village. The Gypsy musicians must know what that person's favorite
melody is, and if he comes to dance, they play his favorite melody.

Now we are working with a big program called "The Final Hour". We
continuously call these musicians and bands to Budapest and make
recordings. For three years, we have recorded more than sixty different
groups. It means that in 1999, there are village bands, old musicians
that cannot read or write the notes.

Are they passing it down to their children?

Some of them, yes, but mostly it's the final hour.

Did you yourselves have parents who played?

No. We learned it from the Gypsies in the villages. I met this music
when I was fifteen. In the dance houses, I met other urban musicians. I
loved it, and afterwards I went to the villages and I learned this music.

Gusztáv: This is a revival.

Are the people in the villages surprised to find people from the cities
interested in their music?

In the beginning, yes they were. Now they are used to it, depending upon
which region you are in. Sometimes there are funny stories. He went to
the northeastern part of Hungary, and he asked some villagers, "Where are
the Gypsy musicians?" And they laughed at him. "You are looking for the
Gypsies? What for? You are coming from Budapest to us!?" They were
surprised. They didn't know what it was about these Gypsies.

And what kind of music do the Gypsies play for themselves?

They don't play it on these instruments. They are singing, snapping their
fingers, keeping rhythm with two spoons, percussion, like castanets.

But they don't play the fiddle?

Not for themselves. There was a Gypsy tune in the show, but this was
transposed for this show onto the violin. They usually would sing it,
snap their fingers, and the guys would vocalize "di, dah, hoh, hey, hoh,
chee .." – traditional Gypsy folk music. So, there are three different
things. This was traditional Gypsy folk music in villages where mostly
Gypsy people live. Others in the city play Gypsy music, but that's not
folk music. They play it in the cafes and the restaurants. And the
third, what we play, is the traditional Hungarian folk music, which is for
Hungarian people and is played by the Gypsies in the villages, but it is
not Gypsy music (laughter)! It's very complicated. Now we're completely
confused and we can have some beer.

Fiddler Magazine wishes to thank Jessica Norris at World Music and Kálmán
Magyar of Centrum Management for their assistance

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