Urban Popular Musical Culture in a Transdanubian Village

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
There has always been a connection between the rural and urban musical culture. The verbunkos music of the 19th century, as an amalgam of urban and rural traditions can nowadays be collected from Transdanubian rural bands as pieces of an archaic folk repertory. The urban Hungarian song (magyar nóta) started to spread from popular theatre pieces, later through the elementary school education, and for the first half of the 20th century in several Hungarian villages it has became the dominant part of the song repertory of the peasants. In a village in Tolna country where I do my fieldwork, the generation over sixty years of age lives in the culture of the magyar nótas and to smaller extent in the new style folk songs. This material has an organic connection to the world of the melodious Hungarian hits (slágers). The big shift has been ensued by the rock music’s rising that had started to change the active singing to mere listening of the music since the 1960s. The rural youth went to the towns to study in secondary schools, where they encountered the new and fashionable musical styles. The generation over forty years of age, as teenagers came under the spell of the rock music, because among others they could find valid messages for themselves in the texts of the rock songs. The 1970’s Hungarian rock has been serving them as an etalon and they try to transmit it to their children with the help of music listening, just like their parents did it with the folkloristic songs for them. They accept the interest of the young generation in the contemporary popular music, but they react to them with a similar lack of comprehension like their parents did to the rock music that meant a big change of musical styles. In my paper on the basis of participant observations and interviews I examine in what categories local people think of music, music listening, the music of the different contexts and the harmonic coexistence of the different genres.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
computer projection