Old Newsweek article on Muzikas

[barger@ils.nwu.edu]

I laboriously typed this in months ago, and then corrupted my mailbox (not
a crime in Illinois :^) before I'd mailed it out.  But the new version of
my mail software (Eudora 1.2.1) managed to salvage it.  Their spectankular
lead singer Marta Sebestyen (sp?) is appearing in Boston next week, and
anyone else who spots a tour-stop, please let us all know...
This is from Newsweek, October 15, 1990 [comments in brackets are mine]:

"FIDDLE TUNES FROM TRANSYLVANIA? De children of de city... Vat music dey
make" [barf!]

Can you stand hearing one more story about college types hearing field
recordings of authentic folk music and learning to play it themselves? 
Heading into the mountains to sit at the feet of white-haired fiddlers and
stony-faced singers of unaccompanied ballads?  Then picking up a cult
following among the coffeehouse set-- though not being able to give up
their day jobs?  Would it help if we told you these musicians are from
Budapest rather than Boston, and that the mountains aren't in Tennessee but
Transylvania?

That, roughly, is the story of Muzikas (the 's' is pronounced 'sh'),
Hungary's most popular folk group.  They do more than a hundred concerts a
year-- in addition to their weekly gig at a Budapest club.  In a time of
resurgent national pride, they've become inspirational figures.  A couple
of them, in fact, _have_ given up their day jobs, though leader and bass
player Daniel Hamar, a university geophysicist, still teaches part time. 
Three Musikas [sic] albums have now been released in the United States by
Hannibal records, a small New Jersey-based ethnic-music label.  The
surprise success of 1988's "Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares"--
_frisson_-inducing songs by the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female
Vocal Choir-- suggests that Eastern Europe's sweet-sour mix of the Western
and the Asiatic appeals to American ears.  The title of Muzikas's new
album, "Blues for Transylvania," is misleading-- it resembles the blues
only in its gloomy lyrics-- but it should get adventurous listeners into
the tent.  And Muzikas should be able to handle things from there.

   The closest analogue to Musikas [sic again!] may be the Chieftans, whose
dramatic, many-textured arrangements of jigs and reels preserve the flavor
of traditional Irish music without the rawness and monotony-- and wrong
notes-- of some field recordings.  The five members of Muzikas play a total
of nine instruments-- including fiddle, cello, recorder, bagpipe,
hurdy-gurdy, bombard (think oboe) and tamboura (think guitar).  They may
sweeten a normally unadorned fiddle tune with a second fiddle playing
harmony, but, like the Chieftans, they sing: vocalist Marta Sebestyen was
once voted the country's best pop singer for her work in a rock opera about
Hungary's King Stephen [!!!].

   Yet traditional Hungarian music remains a minority taste even in Hungary
and Transylvania, the remote Hungarian province annexed by Romania after
World War I.  Back when there was still a Soviet bloc, this taste was
officially discouraged.  Muzikas's audiences often included the secret
police; the group, in turn, chose its traditional material pointedly:
"They... demanded my papers and passport," goes an old outlaw ballad on
their current album. "Two I shot dead before they could move/ And that's my
passport, if you please."  Even today genuine folk music gets little air
time on Hungary's state radio.  And the breakup of the Soviet empire may
only hasten the Europopping of Hungarian culture.  In which case, Musikas
[sic yet again-- I bet the Newsweek spellchecker got both spellings entered
into it?] will end up like traditional musicians elsewhere: with the cult
following, the well-made recordings, the vision of purer times.  Not what
one had hoped, but not the worst.  -- David Gates

===========================================================================
Jorn Barger, Northwestern U., Chicago, Illinois.         barger@ils.nwu.edu
   "And crazyheaded Jorn, the bulweh born?"   _Finnegans Wake_ 513.07
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