Arrabona - Múzeumi közlemények 31-33. (Győr, 1994)

Tanai Péter: Kajárpéci muzsikusok

Musicians of Kajárpéc The days of note of a village and the turns in the village people's lives were made more solemn by the local musicians playing their own music, typical of that particular region. I searched for traces of this cultural self-sufficiency at Kajárpéc, as a participant of a summer camp in 1989 and 1990. This research camp for ethnography had been supported by the Soros Foundation. As the folk music traditions of this rather modest village had been investigated by several researchers before me, I decided to make the musical people the object of my investigation, rather than the music itself. So much more because from the facts collected I always searched for the lines that spoke about'the people behind them. First of all, I looked for people who played or were playing some instruments, and tried to collect data on their social position, the public respect for them and their role in the collective. In 1989 I could not find any active bands at Kajárpéc. The string-bands mostly consisted of gipsies, but I heard that there were some so-called Hungarian bands in the neighbourhood. The Hungarian bands sounded rather rough or uncultured in comparison to the technically skilled, better trained gipsy-bands. There are no gipsy musicians in the village any longer and though their music has been a determinative study of their lives, organization into bands and their traditions could be the subject of further or separate investigation. Apart from the musicians still living and those remembered by the village folk, I have also taken into consideration the instruments used or those that have been use by the peasant and gipsy musicians. I have classified the musical events into calendar feasts and the prominent occasions in the course of folk life. It is most amazing and surprising to discover through analysing the change, development and decline of the village bands, the several different musical strata preserved by and over generations. Though the inns are noisy with the mechanical music emitted from the falshing juke boxes, at fiesta time the door-to-door gipsy musician with a bare violin under his arm still raps at the gate. Péter Tanai 429