Hungaroton Records

V. Magyarországi, Táancház Találkozó 
Fourth Hungarian Dance-House Festival
Hungaroton, SLPX 18101
Made in Hungary, 1985

What puzzles me is the proportion with which Hungarian records appear in thrift stores in Southwest Florida. There is no indication to me that there is a large Hungarian community in the area, so where do all those records come from? But the records keep coming. By now I could have dedicated a whole blog to the folk music of Hungary which I will leave it to one who has more affinity with such music and to one who can read the Magyar language. There are some sites out there, not too many, and not many who update very often. But the standard of records with Hungarian folk music as their topic seems consistently high. It's not that such music is superior to that of other countries/regions, it's just great music, all the way across. Hungarian music was put on the map early as Hungarian composers Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók did a lot to document the music. And maybe unlike many other countries the Hungarians, as a nation, are proud of their musical heritage. Another musician who did a lot for Hungarian Folk music is Ferenc Sebő. He is from a later generation than the aforementioned composers. In September I documented the album Folk Music from Lőrincréve with arrangements by Sebő. I mentioned there that he launched the career of Márta Sebestyén. At the time I didn't include a track on which Sebestyén could be heard but this time I can't overlook her again. Sebestyén is currently the best known musician in the field of Hungarian folk music, probably the best known living Hungarian musician in general. Sebestyén's mother, a musician too, had studied under Kodály.  

Folk Music from Lőrincréve was released in 1986, and this Fourth Hungarian Dance-House Festival is from the year before. Interestingly the identification number of the former SPLX 18102 comes directly after the 18101 of Dance-House Festival. The two tracks shared here are both from side B; Somogyi és Nógrádi dallamok is a medley of short tunes featuring a bagpipe played by Zoltán Juhsz and a fiddle by Márta Virágvölgyi and Szállj el feskemadár a voice solo performed by the aforementioned Sebestyén.

Saliha

Saliha
Soca, SO 330

About every other week I add a new reason to: "What constitutes a good a day at the thrift store?" This week's goes like this: "When I need more time browsing through the records than Maria does looking at the whole store." Needless to say: "We are collectors!" When she goes to one without me she often checks for records, checks if I should go too. Sometimes she even brings a record or two home for me. And I gotta say this: "I'm usually not disappointed." She brought me this wonderful Arabic cassette tape. I always loved the music on it but could not post it here because: (1) I didn't know anything about it, not even the singer's name, and (2) I did not know how to create an MP3 out of a cassette tape. These two issues are now overcome, at least to a certain extent: (1) The singer's name is Saliha, and (2) I downloaded and learned to use Audacity.

Saliha is a Tunisian icon born Salouha Ben Ibrahim Ben Abdel Hafidh in 1914, at the village of Nebr, in Kef. Saliha was born to a poor family and had only one sister called “Eljia”. She recorded between 1938 and 1958 (the year she died). I chose the bit more introverted track 2 from the cassette to share.

The Lament at a Funeral

The Columbia Library of Folk and Primitive Music
Collected and Edited by Alan Lomax, Volume IV: France
Edited by Cl. Marcel-Dubois and Maguy Andral
Columbia Masterworks, KL-207, made in U.S.A., 1952

Funerary lamentation is a widespread practice among catholic countries/regions. It is said to have originated in Roman times but the origins of the singing at wakes and funerals may well go further back than Christianity does. A lamentation is an improvisation of an unaccompanied female wailing voice. The singer is often a relative of the deceased but also could be a hired professional "wailing" woman. In Ireland she's called a "keener", in Romania a "bocitorre", and in this example recorded in Corsica "voceratrice". Laments can be divided up into two categories: that of the wakes and funerals for adults, and for those of children. The adult ones are mournful while children's laments can have a festive quality to them as it is celebrated when a child "becomes an angel" without having experienced the hardships and impurities of life. The practice has become nearly extinct now but it used to be a tradition in nearly all catholic societies. It could be found throughout the Mediterranean, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and other pockets of Catholicism that existed around the globe. I grew up in the Catholic Netherlands, but I don't think lamentation was ever practiced there. It certainly wasn't  when my grandparents died while I was still a little boy in the late 1960s. The Netherlands had a sober kind of Catholicism, it had the introverted ascetic characteristics of it but not not the extroverted spirituality. The folk music in Mediterranean and Latin American countries were influenced by a rich spirituality and a cult of the death. In the sound example below you can hear the 80 year old "voceratrice" Barbe-Marie Monti perform a funeral lament. She is sitting at the foot of the table with the corpse when she starts: Permettetemi un Momuntu. It was recorded in Corsica in 1948. The accompanying text that goes with the lament on the album The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music: France states that in Corsica funeral laments are often the start of a vendetta or family-feud. The improvised laments can contain inflammatory incriminating lyrics, especially if the death of the relative was a violent one.

The World Library

The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music
Collected and Edited by Alan Lomax
Volume VII Indonesian Music
Edited by Dr. Jaap Kunst, Indisch Museum, Amsterdam
Columbia Masterworks SL-210, 1954, Made in U.S.A.

Academic style field recordings from all over the world have been and continue to be the main focus of my record collection. Within these records I like the older ones the best, recorded and collected at a time when there still was little influence of the Western popular music styles onto the traditional music of a certain ethnic group somewhere on this planet. A whole bunch of academic  ethnomusicologists, as well as hobbyists with high ideals, traveled around the world in the middle and later parts of the 20th Century, to record and catalog the music they thought of as a fast disappearing local cultural identity. One of the most prominent collectors out there was Alan Lomax, who spent his life collecting and recording the folk music of the most remote regions of the world. He started documenting the various folk styles of the most remote areas of the US but soon broadened his scope to the whole world. His ambition was to have a giant library that collected all the traditional musics from around the world. He was part of the Library of Congress that focused mainly on the music of the US including all of the various immigrant group's traditional music identities, and founded the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. All the music had to be available to any and every person interested. The scope of that library was broad and ambitious but only 18 volumes were ever compiled by the Columbia label. All 18 of these are sought after and very hard to come by. I just scored my second in a second hand record store in Miami: The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Collected and Edited by Alan Lomax – Indonesia, Edited by Dr. Jaap Kunst, Indisch Museum, Amsterdam is the full identifying title of the record in front of me. The record is divided into four geographical sections: New Guinea, Moluccas, Borneo, and Bali. The first song from this album to share here is an Ewa dance song and is from the Papua part of New Guinea, it's a song by Roro natives, who live scattered in small villages along the South Coast and on Yule Island. The song was recorded by Reverend A. Dupetrat of the Catholic Mission at Yule Island in 1951.The second exerpt from the album comes from Borneo and is a Rice song performed by a group of Land Dyak women. This was recorded by a team from UNESCO-UNO also in 1951.