ROMANIAN SOCIETY FOR ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

National Committee of the International Council for Traditional Music

is nothing else but the annual volume formerly called 'East European
Meetings in Ethnomusicology'. It was in 2001 since we decided to give
this publication the shorter, deserving or at least the more appropriate
title, European Meetings in Ethnolllusicology, in this way stressing both
what this publication has always been and what it should be.

A peer-reviewed and refereed yearbook, European Meetings in Ethnolllu-

sicology is dedicated, on the one hand, to the intercultural and scientific
dialogue, and, on the other hand, to the idea of communicating this dia-
logue to and with the entire world. Sticking to professional, academic EUROPEAN
and exegetical standards, its pages are open to all experts in the various
forms of music belonging to any social and ethnic groups. We trust it MEETINGS IN
is as important as necessary that researchers should meet and mutually
learn about their exegetic performances, methodological particularities
ETHNOMUSICOLOGY
and adequacy, as well as about the collected field materials.

This journal relies upon the conviction that the experts' dialogue in
ethnomusicology, by means of the writing, represents an important cul-
tural action and a scientific performance with highly humanistic aims
and consequences. By means of the ethnomusicology and musical anth- Founded and edited by
ropology scholars might try to appreciate what characterizes or what
solidarizes peoples, groups and individuals, what particularizes of what Marin Marian-Bala~a
imposes them at the world level, what they do have in common and what
is specific to each of them from the creative point of view.
Advisory board
Philip V. Bohlman
The Latin alphabet wiII be used for references as well; and if quoted Margaret Beissinger
titles of original works are not in an international language or in some
more accessible characters, .desirable and useful would be that an
Warwick Edwards
English version to be added in between brackets. Craig Packard
Preferable is that all studies, essays, materials, reviews, signals, reports
Jeremy Montagu
on scientific manifestations, pieces of information, commentaries, dis- Martin Stokes
cussions, polemics or retorts to be accompanied by a presentation or by
some introductory data referring to the professional biography of each
signing collaborator.

Authors are assured we shall have no intervention in the content and

mental options of their articles. Individuals' choices are respected not
only in what the standard way of citing, quoting, and reference listing
are concerned, but even in regard with translation, too.

Waiting forward to getting your collaboration and correspondence at

the address indicated on the other inside cover.
EUROPEAN MEETINGS Jeffers Engelhardt Asceticism and the Nation: Henryk Gorecki,
IN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY Krzysztof Penderecki, and Late
Twentieth-Century Poland 197
Timothy 1. Cooley Migration, Tourism, and Globalization of
Polish Tatra Mountain Music-Culture . . . . .. 208
Contents Joshua D. Pilzer "Inwazja Waranow": Apocalypse and Social
Critique in Polish Rock 227
Maja Trochimczyk Passion, Mourning, and the Black Angels:
Marin Marian-Biila.Ja Musics and Musicologies of the Ewa Demarczyk as the Voice of the Nation ... 236
"Hungarian-Romanian Conflict" 4
Lynn Hooker Transylvania and the Politics of the
Musical Imagination 45
Laszl6 Kiirti Ethnomusicology, Folk Tradition and
Responsibility: Romanian-Hungarian
Intellectual Perspectives 77
Zoltan Szalayi Interethnical Conflict? Reflections on the
Problems Deriving from the Vast Common
Cultural Repertoire of the Cohabiting
Ethnic Peoples in Tr~nsylvania . . . . . . . . . . .. 98
Zamfir Dejeu Cultural Connections within Traditional
Music and Dance in Transylvania 114
Craig Packard A Research Agenda for Studying the Hungarian-
Romanian Ethnomusicological Conflict:
Visits by the Ethnic Police to North America 149
Alana Hunt, Sophia Chapman, Marin Marian-Biila.Ja
[Short Comments, Corrections, Reactions,
Replies, Retorts, and a Post Scriptum] 158

Philip V. Bohlman The Place of Displacement - Polish Musics at

Home and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 166
Katarzyna Grochowska Waclaw of Szamotuly, the Jewel of the Polish
Renaissance: Indigenous or Imported? . . . . .. 179
Daniel Barolsky Performing Polishness:
The Interpretation of Identity 187
 Franklin; executive producer: Francis Peltier; a film by Philippe Monier;
it benefited from a GRECO [financial] aid, within the MEDIA program of
the European Community; copyright 1993.
Nixon, Paul: Sociality - Music - Dance: Human Figurations in a Transylvanian
Valley (Studies from the Musicology Department, no 34), Goteborg:
G6teborg University, 1998.
Transylvania and the Politics of the
Petranu, Coriolan: M. Bela Bartok et la musique roumaine; Observations en
marge des reponses de M Bela Bartok; Epilogue de la discussion avec M. Musical Imagination
Bela Bartok sur la musique roumaine, in: Ars Transsilvaniae. Studien zur
Kunstgeschichte Siebenbiirgens. Etudes d' histoire de l' art transsylvain,
Sibiu: Tiparul Kraft & Drotleff SA, 1944: 302-310,310-319,320-333.
Trumpener, Katie: Bela Bartok and the Rise of Comparative Ethnomusicology:
Editorial Note. As an assistant professor of Music at the University of Richmond, Lynn
Nationalism, Race Purity, and the Legacy of the Austro-Hungarian
Hooker teaches courses on nationalism and music, musical modernism, general music
Empire, in: Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (eds.), Music and the history and world music. She is currently at work on a book provisionally entitled From
Racial Imagination, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Liszt to Bartok: The Shifting Definitions of Hungarian Music. Exploring history with a
Press, 2000: 403-434. critical, postmodernldeconstructivist awareness, thus remaining unfooled by political
tricks laying behind many of our cultural and scholarly enterprises, Lynn Hooker sees
Schmidts, Ludwig: Die Musikkultur in Rumanien, in 'Die Musik' 31/0ctober
multiculturalism as an ultimate positive action.Only(if the policy display she refers to in
1938: 11-24.
the end-that is, a sort of staged, folkloristic 'and commercial multiculturalism-were
not simply another political maneuver, meant to demonstrate the hegemony of an all-
embracing superior culture, and thus meant to end up by bringing a new unilateral packs
of political prestige, influence, and favors.

The unifying theme of this essay is a piece of land: the territory of

Transylvania, a province of Romania. Since the sixteenth century, this
territory has been, in turn, a principality subject to the Hungarian crown,
a semi-autonomous tributary of the Ottoman Empire, a province of the
Austrian Empire (ruled from Vienna), a province of Hungary under the
Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy (administered from Budapest), one of
the three core territories (along with Wallachia and Moldavia) of the
newly united Greater Romania after World War I, a province of German-
allied Hungary during World War II, and since then a region of Romania,
which has itself gone by several different names under a number of
different regimes in recent decades. The population transfers that came
with Transylvania's turbulent history have yielded a region of great
ethnic diversity: the majority of its population (about 75%)1 is ethnically

I According to a 1996 book by Romanian historian 1. A. Pop, quoted by KUrti (200 1:

21). Since Gypsies in Romania as well as Hungary often report themselves as members
Romanian, but there are also substantial minorities of Hungarians, Gyp-
sies,2 and Germans (greatly reduced in number since the end of WWII),
plus smaller numbers of other groupS.3
The Transylvania I want to write about, however, is barely touched
on by this dry recitation of facts. My Transylvania, and I daresay that of
most others, is a landscape of the mind as much as a physical space - the
almost mythical "land beyond the forests" that means something different
to everyone, evoking images of vampires, haunted castles, craggy mount-
ains, Roman ruins, carved churches, and (most relevant for this discus-
sion) singing and dancing villagers in colorful costumes living in an
untouched primitive state. The ethnicities of these villagers and of their
music are what make this imaginary landscape such a hotbed of political
contention, because emphasizing one over another - particularly Hunga-
rian over Romanian, or vice versa - is a hundred-plus-year-old weapon in
the recurring fight over the ownership, physical or metaphorical, of this
territory. This fight has yielded much distrust and little cooperation
between these two countries and their institutions, including in scholarly
fields like musicology which still are prone to claim they are purely
"objective." Yet in the territory of Transylvania, ethnic Hungarians and
Romanians have developed a rich expressive culture with much coope-
ration and many natural points of contact, ,which remain underexplored
by scholars. This is in part because the history of contention over this
region has encouraged scholars to restrict· their research only to their
"own" communities.4
of the majority to census-takers - mainly because of a long and continuing history of
discrimination - this number may be high.
2 This word has often been used perjoratively, and most activists and scholars now
prefer the word "Roma," which is the group's self-designation in the Roma language
(Romani). However, all of the Hungarian Romany I have met generally referred to
themselves in my presence as Gypsies (ciganyok), and Marian-Bala~a (2002: 250)
confirms that Romanian Roma also refer to themselves as Gypsies. For this reason, and
because of the topic of this paper, I use the popular word Gypsy to refer to the Roma,
which also circumvents the linguistic confusion of phrases like "Romanian Roma."
3 http://www.romania.com/facts/demographics.php (accessed July 23, 2002) states that
the percentage of "other nationalities" in the population of Romania as a whole, inclu-
ding Ukrainians, Serbs, Croats, Russians, and Turks, is 1.65%.
4The virulent reactions to Bart6k's crossing of ethnic lines, discussed below and in
Marian-Bala~a's essay in this volume, illustrate this point. The governmental restrict-
Since I believe that it is only by confronting the politics of this
difficult situation that scholarship on this region can truly move forward,
I was pleased when Marin Marian-Bala~a invited me to take part in this
symposium. What I aim to do in this essay, from my own skewed pers-
pective as an American scholar of Hungarian music and in particularly
that of Bela Bm16k, is to probe the politics of music scholarship on
Transylvania, first with a short historical overview and then with some
reflections on my experiences in the Hungarian folk music scene both in
Hungary and North America.
"A Matter not of Sentiment, but of Science',s
One of the reasons this question has remained largely unexamined is the
long history of writing about all kinds of music as if they were untouched
by politics. The depoliticization of music through aestheticism, posi-
tivism, or any other -ism is, as Philip Bohlman writes, "the most hege-
monic form of politicizing music" (Bohlman 1993: 419). Marxism-
Leninism officially considers everything political; in spite of this, positi-
vistic and therefore depoliticizing methodologies of folk music study
(particularly the heavy emphasis on collecting, transcribing, and class-
ifying material) began well before the age of the people's republics,
survived the era relatively intact, and continue to have a strong presence
in the study of Eastern European musics today.
The search for the authentic that has driven much of this research
also steers scholars away from the examination of hybridity. Going back
to Herder and Rousseau, the study of the folk and their music has
emphasized the purity of the "noble savage." The iconic peasant research
subject is untouched by the corruption of urban modernity, and the city is
(erroneously) given sole credit for bringing various peoples together. An
aversion to hybridization that can be traced back at least to nineteenth-
century colonialism and social Darwinism also lingered far later than we
like to think.6 Only in the last decade or so have music scholars taken up
tions of the Cold War era meant that foreign researchers were rare until the 1990s. (The
linguistic challenges of such research should also not be underestimated.)
5 Bart6k 1912 (1976): 157.
6In fact at least into the 1990s, as those that recall the fury over Herrnstein and
Murray's The Bell Curve (1994) well know. The postcolonialist literature, such as
Young (1995), has been important in elucidating discourses on hybridity.
in earnest the process 7 of "constant crossing and recrossing which have
persisted for centuries" (Bartok 1942 (1976): 30).
The desire to avoid both hybridization and politics led to a
curiously aseptic discourse over the inherently political issue of national
music in Hungary at the turn of the twentieth century. Dozens of authors
strove to define "Hungarian music" in "scientific" terms at a time when
debates over the nationality question were growing more and more
heated. As the daily and general press argued over the justice or necessity
of the very policies that Romanians still remember with the most
bitterness - language of place names, language and national orientation
of education, Hungarians' use of their near-monopoly on administrative
positions to discriminate against non-Hungarians8 - music scholars
sought to insulate their work from this quagmire by using "objective"
language. Since the words "nation" [nemzet] and "nationality" [=
minority; nemzetiseg] were the catchwords of those explosive political
and policy debates, several writers used instead the biological term "race"
[fa}], a choice which has rather different associations at the beginning of
the twenty-first century than it did at the beginning of the twentieth.
The most popular topic of this discourse was the objective defi-
nition Hungarian style, something that almost every Hungarian musician
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thought he knew
instinctively, but that was more difficult to pin down in practice. Several
studies wrangled over what exactly the famous "Hungarian rhythm," the
characteristic most frequently credited with distinguishing Hungarian
music from German aesthetic hegemony, was or could be. Each solution
was more convoluted than the last, and each eager to demonstrate that
this Hungarian rhythm was something that could be separated from what
was perceived as the extravagantly "oriental" "lack of discipline" of the
Gypsies that traditionally performed it. While the "Gypsy question" did
7Comparative musicologists (notably including Bartok) made valiant efforts to sort out
and analyze the products, but without completely satisfactory results.
8 Volumes have been written on national questions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in
the years leading up to the First World War. Oszkar Jaszi's The Dissolution of the
Habsburg Empire (1929) is still one of the most seminal works on the topic. I sum-
marize the political and cultural issues of these years with reference to Bartok's
biography in Chapter 1 of my dissertation (Hooker 2001b). An earlier and shorter
version of this chapter is available in The Cambridge Companion to Bartok (Hooker
200Ia).
not have a high profile in Hungarian society at large at this time, it
loomed very large in the consciousness of Hungarian musicians, since it
was somewhat embarrassing both that their national music had its origins
in a light entertainment genre played by restaurant bands, and that its
primary performers were racial aliens.9
It is not only the question of race that illustrates the inextricably
political nature of such discussions. The discourse on Hungarian style
presumed a Hungarian audience with a unified consciousness at a time
when only about half of the country's population was ethnically Hun-
garian. Although Hungarianization proceeded more quickly in the capital
than anywhere else, art music and music teaching was still largely
Austro-German (another sore point for nationalist musicians). We are
well advised to remember these points when reading the (unsupported)
assertion by Geza Molnar, a Leipzig-trained musicologist who taught
classes on Hungarian music history at Budapest's Royal Academy of
Music when Bartok was studying there, that the nerve fibers in the ears of
the ideal "racial" (Hungarian) listener, the "primitive son of the folk,"
respond differently to Hungarian motives than those in a foreigner's ear
(Molnar 1904: xvii). The question of the ethnic composition of the
population is also a salient counterpoint to Molnar's proposed use of
public opinion to test for what repertoire was to be considered "racial":
"If over time a considerable part of a people's unified disposition arises
toward certain rhythm, accentuation, and melodic type, then this music is
racial music" (Molnar 1904: xv). Such a statement begs at least two
critical questions. How is "unified disposition" to be measured? More
importantly, who are the "people"? If they are the "primitive sons of the
folk," the implied elimination of the non-ethnically Hungarian folk of
course glosses over the country's enormous ethnic diversity. If they are
the mostly Hungarian audience for Hungarian Gypsy-style entertainment
music, or the mixed Hungarian/German audience for concert music in
to
Hungary, then the folk are excluded.
9 I discuss the prominent role of questions of both race and nation in early twentieth-
century Hungarian music literature in Chapter 2 of my dissertation (Hooker 2001 b).
10 Although in this period, as Judit Frigyesi (1994) has demonstrated, the Hungarian
national spirit was usually perceived as residing not in the peasantry but in the gentry,
who were in fact the primary audience for Hungarian Gypsy-style music. Still, the Yolk
as conceived by Herder et al. could not be omitted entirely, as Molnar's invocation of
the "primitive son of the folk" demonstrates.
 Many of Molnar's problems were bypassed when a new metho-
dology, folksong collecting (as practiced by Bartok, Kodaly, Janos
Sepr6di, and others), took center stage. This methodology had entirely
different epistemological basis than that of Molnar and his ilk. Instead of
analyzing published scores, collectors recorded and studied bodies of
songs collected in the field. This folksong, as Bartok told his critics, was
a valid fact because a peasant had sung it, whereas the convoluted tables
of '''characteristically Hungarian' rhythm formulas" compiled by "musi-
cal scientists" like Molnar were neither good science nor useful models
for Hungarian composers. (Bartok 1911: 302) As for the nationality of
motives or melody types, Bartok remarked cuttingly that "our 'musico-
logists' [pointedly referring to Molnar] accept any melody sung in
Hungarian as a Hungarian folksong" (Bartok 1911: 302), while his own
comparative analysis was based on,
[... ] systematically classified collections of Hungarian, Slovak, Ro-
manian, and Croatian folksongs [... ] then we would be able to
demonstrate scientifically which ones are the pure Hungarian folk-
~ong types, and which are borrowed melodies or reflect foreign
Influence. (Contrary to the naive opinion of many people, the so-
called 'genuine Hungarian sentiment' is an insufficient basis for the
detection of pure types; indeed, it is not a n~atter of sentiment, but of
science.) (Bart6k 1912: 157; italics added)
As this passage demonstrates, Bartok was at least as addicted to "object-
tivity" as analysts like Molnar, if not more so. And both projects enlist
this objectivity in the service of national (or possibly racial) music. But
while neither party's claims to "objective science" were realized, the
work of Bartok and his fellow collectors at least have preserved a reper-
toire which can still be performed and analyzed, and over which
productive arguments may still take place.
Which is not to minimize the failings of that work. Bartok's focus
on "pure ethnic types" stems from ideas of ethnic and racial purity that
have worn extremely poorly over the last century. I I Also, his impartial
II The recent work of Katie Trumpener (2000) and Julie Brown (2000) amply demon-
strates why, as it puts the racializing discourse in Bartok's writing under a microscope.
Of these two essays, Brown's work is more subtle, showing a better understanding of
the place of Bartok's scholarship in his career as a whole. Marian-Bala~a discusses their
work at some length in his essay.
"sciencing" masks the continuing traces of the nationalist project out of
which he began his researches. EffOlts to apply labels to various portions
of the repertoire are not, cannot be, purely "matters of science": they are
also acts of possession and are necessarily subject to personal bias and
political maneuvering.
In the shifting landscape of the Hungarian-Romanian relationship
in the early twentieth century, a look at Bartok's writings show an acute
awareness of the political, despite the fact that he is often described as an
idealist who was "above politics." In 1913 and 1914, when Transylva-
nian Romanians still chafed under often high-handed Hungarian gover-
nance and debate on the "nationality question" raged in Budapest, Bartok
first published two of the first "scientific" collections of Transylvanian
Romanian folksong: one of music from Bihor County, in Romanian, and
one of music from Hunedoara County, in Hungarian. When a Romanian
critic complained that essentially Hungarian songs had been mistaken (or
passed off) as Romanian in the Bihor article, Bartok adroitly refuted each
of his critic's charges, mostly on purely scholastic grounds. When this
critic questioned the qualifications of a Budapest-based scholar to collect
Romanian material accurately, Bartok turned the critic's doubts about
both the Romanianness and the aesthetic value of Bart6k's collection
against him:
De gustibus non est disputa.ndumi The reviewer [a Romanian]
dislikes the music of the Bihor Romanians; the collector [a
Hungarian], on the other hand, asserts that it is perhaps the most
wonderful folk music in the entire territory of Hungary, which [... ]
are so [... ] beautiful that all the great musicians of Europe - not the
dilettantes, of course - may come to admire it. 12 (Bart6k 1976: 199)
In 1920, after Bart6k's Hunedoara collection appeared in German
translation, he found himself under attack by his boss, Jena Hubay. The
short-lived Bolshevist Republic of Councils government (in which
Bart6k was involved)13 had recently fallen, and the first act of music-
12 Translation modified on basis of original.
13 Bartok was a member of the music directorate for this short-lived government,
although the degree to which Bartok was truly involved or endorsed the views of this
government has been a matter for some debate (which largely divides along predictable
political lines). The period immediately after Horthy's ascent to power was known as
the White Terror, and many people associated with the Republic of Councils either fled
historical significance of the chauvinist and quasi-fascist Horthy regime
was to install Hubay as Director of the Academy of Music, where Bartok
taught. It was in this extremely tense environment, when he was fighting
for his job if not his right to stay in the country at all, that Bartok
defended his folk music research as a "service to the cause of the
Hungarian nation" in his "Response to lena Hubay," the most chauvinist
writing of his career (Bartok 1976: 203). The bulk of this article simply
refutes Hubay's (perhaps deliberate) distortions of Bartok's words, but
the following passage can only be described as a public slap at ~omanian
culture and institutions for the benefit of his Hungarian readers~I cite the
following from my article:
'From among the peoples of our country (that is, Hungary) the Ro-
manians are the ones who have conserved in relatively intact form
the ancient condition of their folk music.' Anyone who is not com-
pletely illiterate in the science of ethnography knows that the sur-
vival of such 'ancient conditions' is possible only on a low cultural
level. The article also makes it quite plain that not a single Romanian
has appeared to perform the systematic study of Romanian folk
music; a Hungarian had to undertake this research, as it is extremely
important from the Hungarian point of view. Is this not proof of our
cultural superiority?I'! (Bart6k 1976: 201-202)
Tuming around once again, when his work came under criticism from
Romanian quarters again in the mid-1930s, Bartok again portrayed
himself as the impartial scientist, both in his direct response to Cluj-based
scholar Coriolan Petranu in 1936 (Bartok 1976: 227-236) and his more
general essay "Folk Song Research and Nationalism" of the following
year (Bartok 1976: 25-28). A brief example serves to illustrate both
Bartok's professed interested in international cooperation and his (and
other Hungarians') generous impartiality:
What actually is the percentage of Romanian songs showing Hun-
garian influence, and influence that I do not [just] claim but prove?
Before I answer, I must point to the following: / In my above-
the country or lost their jobs. Bart6k, Dohnanyi, and Kodaly were all suspended from
their positions at the Academy and disciplinary proceedings were begun against Kod,lIy,
the most radical of the three, though they came to nothing. (Tallian 1981: 117-120)
14 Italics in original; translation modified on basis of original.
mentioned essay (published in Hungarian in 1934) I state that more
or less considerable foreign influence can be demonstrated in about
40 per cent of the Hungarian material. Was anyone in Hungary
offended by this? As far as I know, nobody! / [... ] we can say that
25 percent of the [Transylvanian Romanian] material shows Hun-
garian influence. Is this really so insulting? And whether or not it is
an insult, is it not rather an issue of scientific truth?15 (Bart6k 1976:
235)
Given Bartok's widely divergent and sometimes self-serving (if under-
standably so) rhetoric, why has he been so canonized? Why the need to
forgive him for national indiscretions, not only in Hungary but also in
Romania?16 One answer is changing "facts on the ground." Reading
Bartok's writing with a critical eye was a difficult proposition since the
composer's death in 1945; he rapidly became a potent symbol of the
music and culture of Eastern Europe whose "ownership" was eagerly
sought from both East and West, and from both Budapest and Bucharest.
Writing about Bartok as a symbol necessitated a selective reading of his
output, but criticizing one of the greatest composers of the twentieth
century, one of the best known in the region, and one whose identity was
so intertwined with the people and traditional music of that region, was
not really an option. Second, any complaints about Bartok's treatment of
nationality set off alarm bells because it naturally raised the issue of
nationalism - which, as Marian-Bala~a has mentioned, was officially
non-existent in the international brotherhood of socialist nations.
It would be misleading, however, to say that nationalism went away or
was even suppressed during the decades of communist rule in Eastern
Europe - quite the contrary. Like sexuality in the Victorian era, nation-
nalism was emphasized everywhere, that much more so by the Party's
official disapproval of nationalist sentiment. Ironically, despite that
15 Translation modified on basis of original. (I leave the more detailed discussion of the
contents and Romanian responses to Bart6k's writings on Romanian topics to Marian-
Bala~a's essay, elsewhere in this volume.)
16 See Alexandru's magnanimous dismissal of Bart6k's "accentuation of the [... J
Magyar cultural superiority over the Romanians," cited by Marian-Bala~a elsewhere in
this volume.
official policy, the confederations of national republics that made up the
Soviet Union and Yugoslavia highlighted ethnic difference. As Katherine
Verdery aptly writes,
Precisely because the Soviet regime had destroyed all other bases for
political organization while constitutionally enshrining the national
basis, national sentiment emerged to overwhelm federal politics.
(Verdery 1996: 86)
Nationalist imagery also flourished in other socialist states, whether in
legislation of official languages, education policy, or political rhetoric.
Ceau~escu was by any measure one of the most egregious abusers of
nationalist political rhetoric in hi,>own self-interest.
Of course it was not just in political organization that state socialist
policies enshrined national difference, but in the arts as well. Alongside
its principles of melodiousness, "classic" forms and hannonies, and deep
emotional content, socialist realism called for the use of folk sources in
creating a proletarian music that would appeal to the masses. This call
came from no less a personage than Stalin himself, who wrote in 1934
that "the development of cultures national in form and socialist in
content is necessary for the purpose of their ultimate fusion into one
General Culture [... ]"17 Although the Communists had an at best ambi-
valent relationship to the peasantry - in part due to the difficulties of land
reform, but also because of their preference for the modern symbolism of
the industrial proletariat - they seized on folk music as the most obvious
source of the ideal "national form" in music. In his 1948 resolution on
music, leading Soviet ideologist Andrei Zhdanov not only criticized
many leading composers' "formalistic perversions" (namely dissonance
and inadequate attention to melody) that "negat[ed] the basic principles
of classical music";18 he also singled out one opera composer's failure to
make use of "the wealth of folk melodies, songs, and dance motifs in
which the creative life of the people of the USSR is so rich.'d9
In addition to "encouraging" art-music composers to showcase folk
elements in their works, cultural apparatchiks also spearheaded the
creation of folk ensembles as "representative national art" (Frigyesi 1996:
17 Cited in Frolova- Walker (1998): 331. Emphasis added.
18 Cited in Fosler-Lussier (1999): 32.
19 Cited in Fosler-Lussier (1999): 280.
59). These ensembles could represent the happy socialist nation both to
itself: to domestic audiences as well as ensemble members both professi-
onnal and amateur; and to others: tourists, audiences for tour perfor-
mances, members of sister ensembles in neighboring countries. The first
professional Soviet folk ensembles were founded in the interwar period,
and state folklore ensembles were created in all the satellite countries
after World War II; amateur folk ensembles were also an important social
institution. (Ronstrorn/Malm 2000: 152) These groups were generally not
only funded by the state but also provided with conservatory-trained
leaders from the capital and a list of approved repeltoire. (Noll 2000:
817-818) Ensembles took folk elements as their starting point, but most
of them, with their large choirs and orchestras, tidy musical arrange-
ments, and balletic choreography, had little to do with the actual folk
practice of music or dance.
But then "authenticity" was not really the point. Rather, these
ensembles offered spectacle - gorgeous costumes, acrobatic movements,
enormous performing forces - and a dose of Volkstumlichkeit, an unspe-
cific idea of folk-ness ancl/or nation-ness, signified by easy-to-digest nos-
talgic repertoire. The 104-piece Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble,
among others, continues in this vein today, as a few selections from their
1992 concert video will serve to illustrate: the Volga Boat Song; a
Russian Dance choreographed by "famous Russian ballet master Vyat-
cheslav Modzolevsky"; the national anthem, composed by Mikhail
Glinka; the world-renowned "old Gypsy romance" "Ochi Chornye"
[Dark Eyes], and variations on Paganini's Caprice no. 24 for Solo Violin
played on balalaika. (Red Star 1992)
The aesthetic driving the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble also
valued spectacle over authenticity, at least for its first two decades. The
costumes were magnificent, there were always acrobatic stick dances for
the men and gravity-defying bottle dances for the women (with bottles
balanced on the dancers' heads), and there were a large choir (over ninety
members in 1953, forty-two in the sixties and seventies) and Gypsy
orchestra (between twenty and thirty pieces) accompanying the dancers.
The orchestra played a combination of composed works in Hungarian
style such as Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies and Kodaly's Dances of
GaMma, simplified arrangements of "instrumental peasant music," and
selections from the verbunkos [recruiting music] and csardas repertoire
the musicians brought from their former lives in restaurant bands (Gulyas
1974: 20-21) - the very "Gypsy music" Bart6k and Kodaly had argued
against years before as urban kitsch, the antithesis of true Hungarian ex-
pression. The difference was that unlike an "authentic" Gypsy restaurant
band, the orchestra of the State Ensemble played in a "homogenous,
unomamented style." (ibid.)
Meanwhile, two other Hungarian musical institutions displayed
very different models of what Hungarian music was and should be. Every
schoolchild in Hungary learned to sing through a substantial repertoire of
folksongs, via the Kodaly method (Frigyesi 1996: 64-66); and scholarly
disciples of Bart6k and Kodaly like Laszl6 Lajtha, Balint Sarosi, and
Gyorgy Mmtin continued to collect folk music in villages whenever
allowed, with Martin expanding the scope of work to include the filming
of folkdance. (I should note that Martin and other Hungarian scholars of
this and later generations followed Bart6k's lead in studying not just
Hungarian material but also that of the other peoples inhabiting the
Carpathian Basin.)2o
The disjuncture between the scholars' iconicization of authenticity
- spread to the public through the music education system and the
constant retelling of the Legend of Bart6k and Kodaly - and what the
state ensemble presented as "folk" was one of the issues the dance house
movement came to point out. It also filled a void in Hungary's cultural
life, where "authentic folk expression" had no official place. Aesthe-
tically, neither the popularized Gypsy music nor the slick shows
presented by the state ensemble appealed to the young people who
founded the dance house movement in the early 1970s, and the conceIt
arrangements of folktunes that were taught in school were "serious"
(classical) music, not entertainment.21 The dance house movement
reminded people that this music came out of the social context of the
village. When its first musical leaders, fiddlers Ferenc Sebo and Bela
Halmos, became trained ethnomusicologists, they elevated the partici-
20 By contrast, according to the English summary by Mihai Patra~cu and Colin Quigley,
Zamfir Dejeu's Dansuri tradilionale din Transilvania: Tipologie [Traditional dances of
Transylvania: Typology] (2000) makes no mention of any ethnicities in the region other
than Romanian. (Thanks are due to Kalman Dreisziger for pointing out this source.)
21 The history of the dance house movement has been told many times, including the
account in KUrti (2001: 137-164). A more extensive account of this history in English is
Frigyesi 1996.
pation aspect of participation/observation to exemplary heights.22 They
have acted as a model for the succeeding generations of folk revi val
musicians; almost everyone with whom I have spoken considers
fieldwork in (mostly Transylvanian) villages, including playing with
local musicians, to be an essential part of learning to play the repertoire
authentically. Sandor Timar, choreographer for the Bart6k Dance Ensem-
ble (then the leading amateur ensemble), taught the improvisational
dance style of the villages to attendees at the early Budapest dance
houses, starting with the cycle from the village of Szek (Sic in
Romanian);23 he also used it in his ensemble's choreography (Frigyesi
1996: 59), which eventually sparked a complete revolution in the kind of
dance seen in Hungarian folk ensemble shows.24 What has made the
dance house relevant for most of its participants is that the movement
"claimed and proved that social and performing context of [traditional
peasant] music [... ] is not necessarily only the music of [... ] the past"
(Frigyesi 1996: 58). The dance house invented a new tradition for this
traditional repertoire - created a new context for it, one relevant for
modem urban life.
What made dance houses so popular, particularly in the early days?
In part it was that dancing is fun, that couples dancing in particular offers
a venue for meeting members of the opposite sex, that the dance house
was a festive place for friends to meet and socialize. But there was also a
22 Both of these musicians, the members of the duo that accompanied the very first
dance house event in 1972, have advanced degrees in ethnomusicology. In addition to
playing for dances and making occasional recordings, both of them publish. Addi-
tionally, Halmos is the director of the recently created Tanchaz Archivum.
23 He has taught many other cycles over the years, including the Romanian dances of
Elek and Mehkerek.
24 There is still plenty of "show," of course, from multiple costume changes to some
completely "inauthentic" chorus-line arrangements of personnel. The steps, however,
are all to be drawn straight out of the village. (Gyorgy Martin's films are a central
source.) And according to Kalman Dreisziger, the director of a Montreal dance group
who has long-standing ties with the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble and Zoltan
Zsurafszki's Budapest Ensemble, even professional folk ensemble members ideally
learn the dance steps as improvisatory cycles in a dance house-like setting. Zsurafszki
confirms that many of his best dancers have also been dance housel'S and/or visited
village events. (personal communication) Authenticity is therefore measured in two
opposing ways: faithfulness to the "original" steps, and ability to combine those steps
freely in the moment.)
political aspect to the party: this was something that genuinely had begun
from the grass roots, rather than being imposed from above, and therefore
it had an air of Opposition about it. Despite the fact that some of those in
power were leery of the un-centrally planned in general and the cele-
bration of the pre-collective farm peasant in particular, leading scholars
like Mmtin and Sarosi encouraged the movement and smoothed the
bureaucratic way (Frigyesi 1996:59; Bela Halmos, personal commu-
nication). This was, after all, the era of "goulash communism," when
party leader Janos Kadar's slogan was "those that are not against us are
with us." In such an environment, if it was not too expensive and was not
brazenly oppositional, something that made people happy might stave off
complaints about some of the, shall we say, inconveniences of living
under state socialism. A government that still believed in Stalin 's injun-
ction that culture be "socialist in content, national in form" (although in
little else Stalin had said) could hardly reject a communal celebration of
the art of the people simply because someone else had thought it up.
But what nation should offer this inspiration, which people "owned" this
art? Folksongs and dances are traditionally conceived as being orga-
nically bonded to a particular folk. The folk most often represented in the
dance house are the Transylvanian Hungarians. Of the dialects that
comprise most of the dance house repertoire, the Transdanubia dance
dialect (Dunantuli, beyond the Danube) has its origins within the borders
of present-day Hungary. The town of Satu Mare/Szatmarnemeti, where
the treaty ending the kuruc war against the Habsburgs (led by Ferenc
Rakoczi II) was signed in 1711, is now just east of the Hungarian/
Romanian border (White 2000: 92), though the music and dances known
in the dance house as "Szatmari" seem to come chiefly from the Hun-
garian side of that border. SzekiSic, Mez6seg/Campie (the Transylvanian
Heath), KalotaszegiCalata, and the Szekler Lands/Secuime are all in
25
Transylvania.
25 This list of places/dance dialects comes largely from my own experiences at dance
houses in the U. S. and Hungary. Szab6 (1998: 176) and Frigyesi (1996: 68) each give a
longer list of dialects that have been featured frequently. While there is plenty of
variation among different venues, I believe it is fair to say that these are dialects that
"everyone" (among dance house regulars) now knows. I have deliberately omitted the
This emphasis can be explained with any number of arguments.
First and foremost - for folkdancing is at least as much about dancing as
it is about the folk - is that Transylvanian dances are "more exciting,
more complex, more 'alive' than most of the mainland Hungarian mate-
rial." (Kalman Dreisziger, personal communication) These dances are
full of turning and spinning, intricate footwork, and athletic display (the
latter predominantly for the men). By contrast, the follow-the-leader line
dances of Transdanubia with which many dance house events begin are
quite tame, and many people just sit them out or alTive late.
There are also two historical arguments, though they are somewhat
problematic if viewed with the Romanian listener in mind. The less
controversial is that present-day Hungary modernized more quickly than
Transylvania over the last 150 years. Both industry and large-scale
modem agriculture began in Hungary in the latter part of the nineteenth
century, while Transylvania remained quasi-feudal until after World War
I and improvements in infrastructure did not really begin until after
World War II. Under state socialism Transylvania, a mostly agricultural
region, was somewhat neglected in favor of investment in industry. Thus
more aspects of the traditional peasant lifestyle have persisted there
longer than in Hungary, even with concessions made to modem
developments like banks and collective farming.26
A more Hungarocentric argument, and one that I have heard many
times, is that Transylvania is the true heatt of Hungary and home of the
most Hungarian Hungarians, because of its mostly autonomous status
during the Ottoman period in Hungary (1526-1699). Unlike the bulk of
present-day Hungary, it never fell completely to Turkish domination
(though it did have to pay tribute); and while a northern and western
swath of Hungary came under Habsburg control in the aftermath of the
disastrous Battle of Mohacs (in which the Hungarian king died without
heirs), Transylvania remained free of Habsburg control for almost 150
years longer, and even then only submitted to the Austrian yoke after
Prince Ferenc Rakoczi II's rebellion spent itself. During the intervening
issue of the music and dance CGyimesi") of the Csang6 people of Moldavia. The
contention over their identity deserves its own paper.
26 For a discussion of the different rates of economic development in the Kingdom of
Hungary and Transylvania before World War I, see Chapter 4 of Verdery (1983).
Verdery's Chapter 6, Conclusion, discusses the still slow rate of development in this
region under Romanian sovereignty.
time, Transylvania's princes played the Ottomans and Habsburgs off one
another, led a flourishing court, and set a shining example of religious
equality: while religious wars raged in Central and Western Europe,
Transylvanian Catholics, Protestants, and Unitmians were all granted
equal privileges as adherents of "received" religions. (Notably, however,
Orthodoxy - the faith of the overwhelming majority of Romanians - was
merely "tolerated.") (Verdery 1983: 82-84)
These facts, however, are only a part of the story of Transylvania's
appeal. "The remote borderland" that is the subject of Laszlo Ktirti' s
recent book is not just a place but a construct. Transylvania as an idea
"has been invented many times over by serious writers, artists, politi-
cians, and scholars" (Ktirti 2001: 20), and that idea has been at the center
of national identity of both Romanians and Hungarians since those
national identities began to take their modem shape. In part it is the
"purity" of village life in general, untainted by the corruption of the
modem city, which attracted Romantics to the area. 27 But the fact that
this place is the place where nations collide, in peace and in war, is what
made it more special than the Great Plain for Hungary (and perhaps than
Wallachia for Romania). To quote Ktirti,
In nationalist historiography, the center always feels that the national
borderland is under attack by invading foreigners. When the center is
attacked, the margins are appointed as the carriers - in fact, the sa-
viors - of the tradition by preserving it for future generations. (2001:
18)
For this reason, in addition to the historical reasons I discuss above, the
dance house appointed Transylvania as,
the place to see real and proper Hungarian peasants. In this way, the
lost territory, Transylvania, and the Magyars there were once again
found, reconquered, and reintegrated into the Hungarian imagination
as its own. (Kiirti 2001: 150)
The focus the dance house therefore placed on the Transylvanian ques-
tion soon emerged as a problem for both the Hungarian and Romanian
states. Bela Halmos (personal communication) reports that he and others
27Bartok's descriptions of the simple lives of peasants and their untainted
good example.
countered the rIsmg suspicions about the prominent place given to
Transylvanian Hungarian folklore by also featuring Romanian and
"authentic" Gypsy music and dance from sources within Hungary, like
Mehkerek and Elek. Minority groups within Hungary were encouraged to
set up their own dance houses, though most of these did not last past the
change in regime. There were two major areas of success: at this writing
there are still several Balkan dance houses in Budapest, featuring various
combinations of Greek, Serb, Bulgarian, and Romanian music and dance.
And several Gypsy groups - chief among them Kalyi Jag and Ando
Drom, both of whom recently celebrated their twentieth anniversaries -
used the dance house format and the ideal of "authentic" folk
performance to carve out a sizable place for a different kind of Gypsy
music, after the credibility of the traditional restaurant band had been
decimated by the work of Bartok and Kodaly?8 Hungarian stage
productions of folkdance also have a long history of presenting non-
Hungarian matelial. This history extends back at least to the Hungarian
State Folk Ensemble's Flower of Seven Colors [Hetszinvirag], premiered
in 1965 (Rabai 1974: 29), with the colors of the title being the dances and
music of different ethnic groups living in Hungary. All of these activities
were in keeping with the Communists' internationalism, and so were
"socialist in content," as well as being "national in form." For the dance
house movement in particular, such strategic multiculturalism both
soothed the suspicions of those in power about the movement's possible
nationalist overtones and highlighted the contrast between the tolerant
environment in Hungary and Ceau~escu's oppressive nationalist poli-
cies.29 (Ktirti 2001: 145)
Still, the music and dance of Transylvanian Hungarians remained at
the center of the geography - both real and imagined - of the dance
house. Dance house leaders like Sebo, Halmos, and Sandor Timar,
among others, traveled to Transylvanian villages beginning in the early
1970s to listen to, record, and play with village musicians (Frigyesi 1996:
61-62). Soon, not just the leaders but also the followers were making
28For a history of the discourse on "authentic" Gypsy folk music in Hungary, see Lange
(1997).
29 The destruction of villages, many of them Hungarian, and the closing of Hungarian-
language schools stand at the top of the list of complaints. The fact that Transylvanian
music are a Romanians were also frequently put upon by Ceau~escu's rule was of much less
interest.
visits to villages in increasing numbers to experience authentic folklore
"at the source," particularly at weddings and major calendric festivals.
The hardship of such a pilgrimage to such fountains of authenticity only
added to its spiritual value: transportation was difficult, the water was
bad, and accommodation was often rustic. In the 1970s and 1980s, these
pilgrimages also promised the thrill of defying the Romanian authorities'
ban on foreigners staying with locals. And the lure of the Transylvanian
Hungarian experience was not limited to dance housers from Hungary
proper. British writer Simon Broughton joined Marta Sebestyen on one of
those exhilaratingly clandestine trips to a Transylvanian Hungarian
village wedding in the late 1970s in what was certainly a rare destination
for a Western music journalist in that era (Broughton 1999: 162).
Although these travelers all crossed into Romania, Laszl6 Kiirti (2001:
150) argues that most of them thought of their travels as never really
leaving Hungary - since, in fact, they were going to the most Hungarian
part of Hungary. For many Hungarians, especially dance housers,
internationally recognized borders cannot shake the belief that "Tran-
sylvania is [...] the truest repository of the country's folk soul.,,30
Since the regime changes of 1989, Transylvanian pilgrimages have
been institutionalized as folk music and dance camps and transport is
somewhat improved (though the roads are still bad), so less daring is
required to have this kind of "authentic" experience. At this writing, the
website of the Dance House Guild advertises no fewer than fourteen
Hungarian and Hungarian Gypsy folk music/dance camps in Romania
(Dance House Guild 2002). The international success of recordings
featuring Marta Sebestyen - from her two-decade collaboration with the
foundational dance house group Muzsikas to her appearances on the
soundtrack to the Oscar-winning film The English Patient and on Deep
Forest's World Music Grammy-winning album Boheme - has also en-
couraged listeners everywhere to visit Transylvania in their imagina-
tions, and it has also disseminated the idea of a predominantly Hungarian
Transylvanian music (and with it perhaps a predominantly Hungarian
Transylvania?) to a global audience.
The problem with this mystical Transylvania of the mind, source of
pure Hungarian folklore, is that it raises so many nasty associations past
and present. For Hungarian citizens not of purely ethnic Hungarian
30From the biography of Marta Sebestyen and Muzsikas posted at http://www.omnium.
com/balkans/muzsikas.html, accessed August 16,2002.
descent - particularly Jews and Gypsies - the emphasis on the connection
between Blut and Boden sounds exclusionary, prompting memories of the
Third Reich as well as of the more recent horrors in the former
Yugoslavia. In recent years, the Hungarian political parties that most
heavily stress the issue of Hungarian minorities ip Transylvania are on
the right. The Hungarian Truth and Life Party (MIEP), to give an extreme
example, is openly anti-Semitic, anti-Gypsy, and anti-foreigner. It is also
anti-Western, anti-NATO, and anti-European Union, and its preoc-
cupation with the map of pre-World War I Hungary is one more example
of its willingness to defy the powers of the West, who would prefer as
little agitation over borders as possible.31 This map has become
something of a symbol of chauvinism and thinly veiled irredentism not
only to Romanians, but also to many Hungarians. And of the Hungarian
dance house events I have attended, in Budapest, Chicago, and western
Pennsylvania, all of them - save one - have included some version of this
map as one component of the otherwise wildly divergent decor. The
usual form this map takes is the colorful patchwork of counties, the
Hungarian version of what Benedict Anderson called the "map-as-logo."
This map is:
Pure sign, no longer compass to the world. In this shape, the map
entered an infinitely reproducible series, available for transfer to
posters, official seals, letterheads, magazine and textbook covers,
tablecloths, and hotel walls. Instantly recognizable, everywhere
visible, the logo-map penetrated deep into the popular imagination,
forming a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nationalisms being
born. (Anderson 1991:175)
To many Hungarians, this "logo-map" is a sign of a lost era, of their lost
paradise, of injustices done to their nation at the end of both world wars.
To Romanians, it is the persistent visual depiction of a system that they
rightfully remember as unjust, as well as a sign of what are often seen as
31 MIEP is so extreme that their support fell below the threshold required to be repre-
sented in Parliament in this spring's elections. This is in part because the more
mainstream rightist coalition government (the Hungarian Democratic Forum and Young
Democrats) used just enough nationalist Greater Hungary rhetoric to skim off their less
than completely rabid supporters. Nevertheless, this conservative coalition fell to the
liberal coalition of the socialists and Free Democrats by a razor-thin margin (still
contested by many at this writing) in a fairly nasty campaign.
Hungarians' continuing designs on their territory. Few symbols could
polarize Hungarians and Romanians so effectively, and the dance house
almost inevitably takes place in its shadow.
In some locations, however, the map's different coloring removes it
somewhat from the symbolism attached to the "logo-map." The large
map at the Molnar Street dance house in central Budapest (where foun-
ding father Bela Halmos still plays every Saturday night) exchanges the
usual colors and shapes of the administrative divisions of imperial/royal
power for a color code indicating the ethnic majority of each area. There-
fore it shows not only Romanian majorities for most of Transylvania, but
also Slovak majorities in the northern regions, Croatian majorities to the
southwest, and Serbian majorities not only to the south and southeast but
also in Szentendre, the last stop on the commuter train line north of
Budapest. Though the outline of this map is the same as that of the "Iogo-
map," its colming diminishes the associations that come with the logo, so
it offers my imagined journey signposts that seem less compromised by
the imperial past, that acknowledge the presence of non-Hungmians,
though it does not provide the place-names they use. (I have to look these
up at home.) From my point of view as a relatively new dance house
attendee with limited grasp of the musical geography we traverse over the
course of the evening, this map is a valuable resource, as it allows the
veterans to point out to me the places of origin for the dances we are
doing. A similar map on the wall of Hungary's Institute for Musicology
that so shocked the institute's Romanian visitors (discussed by Marian-
Bala~a) might also be explained away as a tool of the trade.
Yet the fact remains that the outlines of these maps are the outlines
of pre-World War I Hungary; they are not just fieldwork tools, or a
geographical representation of the colorful folk customs of days gone by,
or in any sense "just maps." Like the dance house's preoccupation with
Hungarian dances beyond Hungary's present-day borders, these maps are
a way to "represent the unrepresentable" (Bohlman 2000: 654): the de-
sire, however muted, to claim that space beyond in a political landscape
that makes it all but impossible, for very good reasons, to do so in
32
words. This message is not something that can be explained away as
some sort of figment of the oversensitive viewer's imagination.
32 There is still plenty of discussion in Hungary and in the Hungarian diaspora
community about the injustices of the Treaty of Trianon (which confirmed the post-
World War I borders), but when it comes down to stating what exactly should be done
In his 1937 essay "Folk Song Research and Nationalism", Bartok wrote
the following:
International cooperation is desirable in every branch of scholarship,
but perhaps nowhere else is it so urgently needed as in the field of
folk music research. But amidst the mentioned hostilities [the
Petranu attack] how is it possible even to talk of cooperation, since
we see all over the world not cooperation but counter-activity?
(Bart6k 1976: 28.)
Sixty-five years later, the state of hostility over Transylvania sometimes
feels only a fraction less heated than it was in the late 1930s, and the
geographical signifying I have discussed leads one to doubt that musico-
logy can lead the way in healing this rift. Yet some recent Hungarian
projects in performances of traditional music and dance of the region
show signs of hope for the development of a genuine spirit of collabo-
ration across national lines. These projects have highlighted the music of
East-Central Europe in general, and Transylvania in particular, not as
belonging specifically to one ethnic group but instead as a hybrid - a
product of the region's rich cultural mix. Bartok too recognized this mix,
in fact celebrated it, particularly in his 1942 "Race Purity in Music." But
so fundamental was the idea of the "pure type" and "point of origin" to
his habit of thinking (at least in prose - his music was further ahead in
this regard) that he was rarely able to incorporate it into his basic
methodology. Though the projects I discuss below largely share Bartok's
epistemology of collecting, they move away from the urge to separate out
the "pure types" or to discover the most "authentic" version of the
material collected, and focus instead on what brings them together.
about this injustice more than eighty years after the fact, none but the most extreme
would dare suggest actually readjusting the borders. Even mentioning such a step seems
dangerously provocative (particularly given the recent history of the former Yugoslavia)
and would be viewed very critically by the international bodies to which Hungary
aspires. Instead, rhetoric focuses on human rights and self-determination for Hungarian
minorities in formerly Hungarian territories and on priority status for immigration to the
motherland, both of which are acceptable in the West. (Immigration priority is more
contested, as it codifies in law an idea of citizenship based in blood rather than common
civic values. Yet the right of return has parallels in Ireland, Germany, and Israel.)

Vocalist Kati Szvonik, an ethnic Hungarian originally from near Kosice,
Slovakia, offered one such case well before its time. Her Fairyland:
Hungarian and Romanian Folk Music from Transylvania (Szvonlk et al.
2000 (1988», also featuring fellow vocalists Martin Balogh and Marta
Sebestyen, presents songs which have been collected in both Romanian
and Hungarian versions. It was originally recorded in 1988 and was then
re-released on CD in 2000. More recently, Szvorak has been editing and
performing on a series of recordings which brings together material
common to many of the ethnic groups of Central Eu-rope, with the
collaboration of scholars and musicians from Austria Slovakia and
Hungary. The first of these is a Christmas album which is sung i'n ten
languages - Hungarian, Romanian, Latin, Slovak, Czech, Moravian,
Polish, Croatian, German, and Gypsy - all "authentically and with
conviction" (Szvorak/ Monarchia 2000: 4). The most traveled of the
selections appears on this recording in five versions and four different
languages, played back to back with different instrumentation for each.
Szvorak and her collaborators have produced a similar album of Central
European children's songs, and an album of Shrovetide (Carnival) songs
is in the planning stages (personal communication).
Several projects related to the dance house scene demonstrate renewed
interest in multiculturalism on the part of some of its leaders. Most
obvious are dance houses devoted to Balkan and Gypsy music and dance,
as mentioned above, not to mention the more recent establishment of a
flourishing Irish dance house. But even more encouraging is the enga-
gement with multiculturalism, particularly a multi ethnic Hungary and a
multi ethnic Transylvania, in leading institutions of the Hungarian dance
house both in Hungary and in North America. There has been an upsurge
of interest in Gypsy culture internationally of late in addition to a rise in
ethnic consciousness among Hungarian Gypsies?3 I have been able to
33 This is partly in response to the rise in open racism, which was officially illegal
during state socialism. Nonetheless, the rise in Hungarian Gypsy ethnic consciousness
predates 1989, and in fact can be linked to the establishment in the 1970s of Gypsy
folklore ensembles, led by Kalyi Jag and Ando Drom. (See Kovalcsik (1997) and Lange
attend classes in the dances of both Hungarian and Romanian Gypsies of
Transylvania in classes in Budapest (at Molnar Street) and in western
Pennsylvania.
Gypsy musicians have of course played for audiences of all
different ethnicities for centuries, to such a degree that the word "Gypsy"
is substituted freely for the word "musician" in several different lan-
guages. Now Transylvanian Gypsy bands play not just for Hungarians
but with them, as esteemed informants - whether at a summer camp in
Transylvania or Pennsylvania, a dance house in Budapest or New York.
The Szaszcsavas Band, from Szaszcsavas/Ceuas/Grubendorf (a village of
about 900 inhabitants in the Kis-KlikliIl6/Tarnave region), has played in
all these places. Although they tour and record under the Hungarian name
of their predominantly Hungarian village, the poster for the SzaszcselvelS
Band's 1998 North American tour bears the text "Folk Music from
Transylvania: Hungarian, Gypsy, Romanian, Saxon," pointing out that
they act as the keeper of many musical cultures in their home region. The
picture on this poster, which has a tongue-in-cheek mafia motif
appropriate to the tour's stop in Chicago, adds a global dimension to this
multicultural trope.34
The largest project in which village Gypsy bands, including mem-
bers of the SZelSZCSelVelS, have been featured recently is the Final Hour /
35
New Patria series. This series bears certain features of another meta-
(1997).) Manifestations of international "Gypsy chic" include the success of the films of
Tony Gatlif (Latcho Drom (1993), Gadjo Dilo (1998)) and Emir Kusturica (The Time of
the Gypsies (1990), Black CatlWhite Cat (1998)), the sustained popularity of the Gipsy
Kings, and the expansion of the "Gypsy section" at stores like Tower Records - though
many of the entries have shamelessly exoticizing titles like Children of the Wind or
Gypsy Magic (cited in bibliography), some of these include excellent music.
34 The photo shows the band members in their traditional hats combined with sun-
glasses, colorful suits, and loud ties instead of their usual vests; three of them also hold
violin cases, and all of them wear very serious expressions that suggest that there are
things other than violins in the cases. The mafia association is strengthened by the fact
that the same photo also appears on the cover of their album Live in Chicago (Szasz-
csavas Band 2000), recorded on this tour.
35This Final Hour (Utolso Ora) is the latest of many declared final hours for folk music
in Transylvania, and probably not the last, though changes are certainly come to the
region. The name "-oj [New] Patria" is an homage to the series of recordings of folk
musicians made in the late 1930s by Bartok, Kodaly, and Lajtha in cooperation with
Hungarian Radio and the Museum of Ethnography. (KelemenIPavai 1998: 19) The
House of Traditions, through which funding is directed, is a recently formed umbrella
phorical colonization: a massive collection of Transylvanian music made
in Budapest in 1997-98 with funding from, among other places, the
Hungarian Cultural Ministry. This project was founded by Laszlo Kele-
men who is a member of the Okras Ensemble (a venerable dance house
band) as well as director of the House of Traditions (Hagyomanyok
Hdza). Each band was brought to Budapest for a period of five days with
singers and dancers from their village in order
to make archival recordings not only [of] each band's repertoire of
melodies, which serves the entertainment needs of more than one
ethnic group, but also to document information regarding customs
surrounding traditional music and dance life. (Kelemen/Pavai 1998:
18)
Selections of each band's archival recordings are now gradually being
issued commercially, each with one CD tucked into the back of a hand-
some hardbound little book of thirty pages or more.
Although we would not know it from the above note, this project
did go beyond simple documentation, as the band of the week also played
for a public dance house on Wednesday evening at the Fono Music
House, and the dancers both demonstrated and danced with the crowd.
This note - as well as the display of the Romanian (i. e. official) names of
bands' places of origin on those handsome CD booklets - also sug-gests
a lack of the monoethnic stridency of some past occupations of
Transylvania's imaginary landscape. More so than earlier commercially
available recordings of Transylvanian folk music that I have seen, these
truly attempt to represent ~he.full ra~}e of re~ertoire that one group plays.
Thus the serious folk mUSIChstener who stIll does not want to or cannot
dig into the collections of archival recordings at the Institute for Musi-
cology or the Ethnographic Museum can buy a collection that demon-
strates the "crossing and recrossing" of musical material that Bartok
noted in his essay "Racial Purity and Music" even in the limited space of
one CD. In volume 3 of the Last Hour collection, we find music that the
organization which oversees the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble, the archive housing
Gyorgy Martin's and Laszl6 Lajtha's estates, and the dance house archive (among other
sections).
36 With "samplers" available by better-known dance house bands, these items are
simply not likely to be the first thing a novice folkie buys, even though their price at
Hungarian stores is surprisingly reasonable.
Macsingo Family Band of MagyarpalatkalPalatca plays for an ethnically
mixed audience of Hungarians, Romanians, and Gypsies in that village,
as well as neighboring villages in the Transylvanian Heath (Campie/
Mez6seg region). According to editor Kelemen,
A Gypsy primas [lead fiddler] from Mez6seg learns and plays the
melodies which are used in that area without discrimination,
adjusting them according to his own preference, varying for
example rhythm or tempo. For them there is no ideologic point of
view when considering the origin of a melody. The name of a
dance generally has no relationship to a melody's origin. For
example, in the [... ] slow Gypsy dance or in songs sung at Gypsy
wakes, actual Gypsy melodies are not necessarily heard; or Roma-
nians, Hungarians, and Gypsies alike feel that the same tunes for
sending boys into the army [... ] are their own; or we hear obvi-
ously Hungarian [ ... ] melodies sung in Gypsy or in Romanian (or
even in a [Romanian] de-a lungu rhythm). (KelemeniPavai 1998:
23)
The ethnoscape of this region, as reflected in its soundscape, is far too
gloriously muddled to try to sort out the priority of one strain over the
other. The richness of this mix is emphasized visually in, yes, a map in
the same booklet (ibid.: 21) - a trilingual map (Romanian/Hungarian/
German) of the area east and north of Cluj. Rather than being required to
read against competing monoethnic maps by cross-referencing corres-
ponding place names, the reader finds the region's diversity laid before
her in cartographic form. Every spot on this small map section naturally
has a Romanian name; about half to two-thirds also have Hungarian
names, and a handful also have German names.
The image of diversity projected by this map is not quite up-to-date
- the vast majority of the Germans have left, and the lack of Gypsy-
language village names renders this burgeoning population cartogra-
phically invisible, as it has officially been for its entire history. Yet when
we consider the sound-map of the traditional music of Transylvania,
Budapest still views Gypsy musicians as its rulers, whether or not they
even speak Hungarian. Despite the Macsingo family's Hungarian names
and their membership in the historically Hungarian Calvinist church, only
one of the band members speaks Hungarian (Kelemen/Pavai 1998: 22).
Yet the Last Hour project - a music-geographical survey supported by
the Hungarian government - has devoted an entire volume of that survey
to them. Instead of being symbols of Hungarianness, they, along with the
other Gypsy bands in this series, are symbols of hybridity, of "constant
crossing and recrossing" of musical and physical boundaries. This
celebration of cross-fertilization is the kind of multicultural ideal "the
West" can embrace, even try to take credit for, but this multi-culturalism
is not western at all: it is Transylvanian.
(c) Dancing diversity: Zoltan Zsurafszki, the Okras Ensemble, and Bon-
chida
As I discussed above, the predominantly Transylvanian Hungarian itine-
rary of the dance house journey, real or metaphorical, has raised a few
eyebrows. One interesting challenge has come with a recent surge of
attention focused on BonchidaiBontida, a village about 30 km from Cluj
in the northern part of the Transylvanian Heath,3? brought about by the
work of dancer, choreographer, and dance house instructor Zoltan Zsu-
rafszki, in collaboration with musicians like Laszlo Kelemen and the rest
of the Okras Ensemble.
In 1997 the Okras Ensemble issued a recording called Bonchida
Haromszor/Bon{ida Times Three, and Zsurafszki developed a program of
the same title for his Budapest Dance Ensemble, with music directed by
Kelemen, which premiered in 1999. At a time when nationalism was
once again a very loud force in regional politics, these projects stood out
because of the emphasis on Bontida's multiethnic character: 57% Roma-
nian, 26% Hungarian, 17% Gypsy.38 According to Laszlo Kelemen's
notes to the Okras recording, each group was associated with a particular
style of dance, which they would dance side by side, but other dances
were danced by more than one group. (Okras 1997) To reflect this,
Zsurafszki divided his troupe into "Romanians," "Hungarians," and
"Gypsies" in a folk ballet of peaceful coexistence.39
37Bontida is the site of the decaying Banffy Palace, the "Transylvanian Versailles"
(Ka1l6s 1999). The site is now under restoration, with funding from both the Romanian
and Hungarian governments. In 2000 it was added to the New York-based World
Monuments Fund list of 100 Most Endangered Sites. (http://www.wmf.org/2000list.
html?side=2090&year=prev, accessed July 23, 2002.)
38 See http://members.tripod.comJ-vastaghuros/bonchida.htm, accessed July 23, 2002.
39In his next big show - Csardas! The Tango of the East, which toured North America
in the winter and spring of 2000 - Zsurafszki also emphasized the mixture of peoples
The dances of Bontida, Hungarian, Romanian, and Gypsy, had
been taught in dance houses and presented on stages in Hungary and
North America before Zsuriifszki and the Okras Ensemble turned their
attention to this village. But both the high profile of these arti sts,
internationally recognized leaders in their field, offered it a certain pres-
tige. In 1999 - thus in the same year as the premiere of the Zsurafszki
show and a North American tour by Okras - interest was judged
sufficient to issue field recordings made in Bontida by Cluj-based Zoltan
Kallas and Budapest-based colleagues, including Gyargy Martin, for sale
on CD. (Kallas 1999) And the spotlight on Bontida, where Romanians,
Hungarians, and Gypsies danced together harmoniously, again empha-
sized Transylvania as a locus of peaceful diversity instead of conflict.
This somewhat rosy picture may prompt readers to question whether
these shifts in modes of viewing the ethnic landscape of Transylvania are
not just one more instance of claiming that space through a pose of
enlightened impartiality, just as Bartok did in his responses to Romanian
critics, or as the early dance housers did when they programmed
Romanian dances from Hungary as a defense against charges of nation-
nalism. The key difference between those early instances and these more
recent cases, however, is that the recent elevation of the discourse of
multiculturalism in the dance house as primarily directed not outward, to
Romanians or to a seemingly monolithic government, but inward - to
other Hungarians, both in the country and in diaspora.4o This discourse
responds to the political discourse of the last twelve years, in which the
question of Transylvania has come up again and again, with varying
degrees of rancor. By celebrating the mixture of peoples instead of
and cultures as he sent "Hungarian" characters on an imagined dance-journey through
the Carpathian Basin, dancing the dances of the people they meet on their trip: Gypsies,
Polish Gorale, Slovaks, and Romanians. The program notes for this show stress both the
improvisatory nature of the csardas (pace Riverdance) and the shared dance traditions of
the region. (See especially pp. 14-15 of the program booklet for the show, presented by
Columbia Artists and Centrum Management.) I use "folk ballet" as short-hand for a
dramatic production using folkdance, and do not mean to imply any relationship bet-
ween the two styles of movement.
40Some North American Hungarians were reportedly quite indignant when the Okras
Ensemble's included Romanian repertoire in their North American tour of 1999.
arguing over which one has precedence, though, artists like Kati Szvonik,
Laszl6 Kelemen, and Zoltfm Zsunifszki highlight the indigenous diversity
of Transylvania, that fantastic but troublesome territory of both the map
and the mind.
I borrow my final question from Bart6k's 1937 "Folk Music
Research and Nationalism": "What must we do, what must we demand?"
Bart6k's answer is that we must demand "the greatest objectivity that is
humanly possible" of any researcher, that the scholar of musical folklore
must make a particular effort to suppress all national feelings while at
work. Yet he also acknowledges what we all know - that
this requirement is, after all, only an ideal [... ] which can hardly be
attained. Man is, in the last analysis, an imperfect creature and is
often the slave of his sentiments. And it is exactly the sentiments
connected with one's mother tongue and the affairs of his country
that are the most intuitive, the strongest. (1976: 28)
To ask that we all shed our individual backgrounds before entering the
folk music "laboratory" is not only not realistic; it is not productive
either. It is out of the differences in our experiences that we may start our
most interesting conversations. What we must demand instead - of our
colleagues and ourselves - is an attitude of respect for each other and for
our respective knowledge systems (starting with geographical labels), and
the benefit of the doubt, although we are bound to have mis-
understandings. What we need to do is use these misunderstandings as a
catalyst for asking the right kinds of questions.
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Editorial Note. The author currently teaches anthropology at the University of Miskolc,
Hungary. Suffice is to notice his titles in the bibliography in order one to realize that
Laszlo Ktirti is a very active, fertile, versatile, and daring scholar.

My colleague in Bucharest has proposed a gentle dialogue on what seems

to be a rather silent and least discussed phenomenon: Hungarian-Roma-
nian conflict with reference to ethnographic, folkloristic and ethnomu-
sicological research. Most scholars in these countries have shied away
from any open engagement with regard to this issue. More often than not,
highly symbolic language was used to mention it. One can find ranting
and raving statements in extremist and nationalistic circles operating in
both countries. These, mostly because of their highly subjective, hateful
and anachronistic tones, are not considered in this paper. I must admit
that this call from my colleague in Bucharest could not come at a better
moment. As I write my reflections, the two states are engaged in a fierce,
largely distorted and intellectualized polemic about the recent Hungarian
parliamentary decision to provide extra benefits to Hungarian nationals
outside of Hungary. On July 28, 2001, the Romanian prime minister,
Nastase and his Hungarian counterpart, Orban, decided to meet for a
short discussion about the new law but the meeting resulted in an even
more hostile attitudes toward each other.
Know as the "status law", this new Hungarian policy would provide
those Romanian, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, Slovene and Ukrainian
citizens extra legal, work, health and educational benefits while in