Concert features recovered music of prewar Hungary

Muzsikas
Muzsikas

The lost Jewish music of Transylvania will be the focus of a Nov. 5 concert at the Toronto Centre for the Arts, featuring the acclaimed Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikás.

More accurately, the music drills down even deeper than Transylvania, a region rich in Hungarian language and culture now wholly within Romania.

Presented by the Ashkenaz Foundation as part of Holocaust Education Week, the concert will focus mainly on the recently recovered folk music of the region of Máramaros, once home to 5,000 Jewish families.

The music, along with the families, all but vanished in the Holocaust. So the concert may aptly be called aural history.

The classically trained quartet, formed in 1973, will play a variety of instruments native to the region and are slated to be joined by soloist singer Agnes Herczku.

In its early years, the group was at the forefront of Budapest’s tanchaz (dancehouse) scene, and a roots music revival grew to national levels.

After the fall of communism in Hungary and Romania in the late 1980s, members undertook a challenging mission: find and preserve the Jewish music of Transylvania, and specifically of the northeastern Carpathian region of Máramaros, which today straddles Romania and Ukraine but where Hungarian culture was once dominant.

The sounds, meantime, were not quite klezmer, not quite Gypsy, and the drive to preserve them was not driven by personal imperative. None of the band members are Jewish.

“We admire Jewish culture and we got involved as though we got an inheritance, that it’s our duty to collect and to make some memory of the lost Jewish tradition of peasant music of Hungary,” Muzsikás member Daniel Hamar explains in a telephone interview from Hungary.

Hamar calls the music the band plays “traditional Hungarian village music” and “traditional Hungarian village Jewish music. We would like to show there isn’t much difference between the two.”

He explains: “A peasant farmer creates a special type of culture. There were very few people in Europe who could be Jewish and a farmer because Jews could not buy land, except in Transylvania.”

So the region became a Petri dish in which Jews formed a peasant class and created a unique musical legacy.

“For centuries, Jews were the musicians of Transylvania, and only in the 19th century were they replaced by Gypsies,” Hamar says.

When band members travelled the region, “we collected Jewish music but didn’t find any Jewish musicians. So it’s very tragic but a very typical story of eastern Europe. The culture survived but the people didn’t.”

The music they encountered “was extraordinary, something we never heard before. It completely changed our lives.

“The local musicians use a different technique than in classical. All of us are trained classical musicians. When we heard a violin, viola or bass, it was completely different than what we were used to in classical music. So we learned how to play, what the technique was and, most important, how to improvise. It was a new language for us.”

Band members were encouraged by the Hungarian composers Zoltan Kodaly and Bela Bartok, who also collected and transcribed folk music. Hamar says there are some 200,000 recordings of folk and related music in the archives of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

“But it’s very difficult to learn this music just by listening,” he said.

Hamar himself plays double bass, a gardon, which resembles a cello but is played percussively like a drum, and something called “Jewish drums,” best experienced live.

The music, he says, is reflective of the Jewish experience in the region: By turns “happy and something one would play at a funeral.”