Tradition, Theory, Practice. Mission Statement of the Folk Music Department at Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest. (Accepted)

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
By the early 1970s, mainstream Hungarian ethnomusicology possessed an immense ocean of archive field recordings, a worldwide-unique, extensive method of tune-typology, and a pertinent classification system. It also had more than seventy years of expertise in both musicological and cultural-anthropological tune-analysis, efficient fieldwork, and research on complex and abstract phenomena of traditional music within the Carpathian Basin and beyond. This environment provided fertile soil for the sprouting Hungarian revival movement, the táncházmozgalom, whose past 49 years show great success in efficiently grafting traditional music and dance into the urban environment. Now Hungarian ethnomusicology wasn’t only a theoretical think tank--folk music theorists, táncház musicians, and choreographers worked side-by-side exploring still-undiscovered issues of the Hungarian tradition, our ethnic neighbors, and minorities. This atmosphere fostered research of functional aspects in musical and dance folklore and in the Carpathian Basin’s complex inter-ethnic relations, as well as contributing to development in practice-based examination of instrumental music. From the mid-’90s onwards, folk music as a label gradually became an integral part of the Hungarian music industry, and more and more musical projects chose to drift away from pure authenticity in order to discover new paths in traditional-rooted crossover. With the terminal dissolving of the once-firm system of traditional rural societies and as the last old informants pass away, younger folk musicians and scholars, beginning with the generation of the author, must lean on archive field recordings to acquire their skills. This presentation centers on archival, analytical, and practice-based approaches developed within the Liszt Ferenc Academy for the essential preparation of musicians for the range of folk-music applications from revival through the wide variety of cross-over genres that have and will evolve.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Folk Musician and ethnomusicologist Dr. Soma Salamon is one of the most prominent members in the younger generations of the Hungarian folklore revival movement (Táncházmozgalom). Besides his active performing career spanning multiple decades and continents, he is the folk music program editor and consultant of the recently-launched House of Music in Budapest. Posts include research fellow in the Institute of Musicology and lecturer for instrumental and theoretical classes at the Liszt Academy of Music. He is a frequently-invited presenter at Massachussetts College of Art and Design. His main fields of research are ethnic flutes in the Carpathian Basin, methodology/comparative analysis in Hungarian ethnomusicology, international relations of Hungarian ethnomusicology and folklore studies, typology of Hungarian folk melodies, Bartók‘s Transylvanian field recordings, historical and multicultural relations of stylistic strata in Hungarian folk music, Western reception of Hungarian folk music research, margins between folk music and world music.