Paksa Katalin - Németh István: Muravidéki magyar népzene (Budapest - Lendva, 2018)
A régió népzenéjéről
43 About the Folk Music of the Region Our book is the realization of an old promise. In 1998 my colleague István Németh and I was collecting folk music in the Mura region, about which I had the following to say in the Lendva-based periodical “Muratáj”: “Why did we come to the Mura region, of all places? Our job as folk music researchers is to get to know the entire Hungarian folk music from Transdanubia to Moldavia, from Upper Hungary to Voivodina. This evidently includes the western border zone of the Transdanubian folk music dialect as well. The collected tunes are preserved in the audio archives of the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. (In this archives the folk music of the region is only represented by Lajos Kiss’ collection of 1969 at present.) At the same time we would like to contribute to the survival of local tradition with the tools available to us, a - planned - CD selection from the collected material.” Other assignments, other tasks kept postponing the publication of our collection. Tarrying, however, proved useful in the end, because the lengthy delay ripened the idea that we should massively enlarge the undertaking: we should not rest content with a CD based on a single field trip, but we ought to survey everything available about the folk music of the Mura region; instead of a selected audio material, we should offer a monographic summary of the folk music of the region, with scores and ample audio supplement. We deemed it indispensable to elaborate Lajos Kiss’ collection, as well as those of Ernő Király and Károly Horváth whose recordings - as it turned out - were hidden in the audio archives of the Institute for Musicology. Relatively few data were available to use for the monograph of the Mura region. Compared to other areas of Zala and Vas counties where phonograph recordings were already made by Béla Vikár in 1905 followed by several collectors, in the Mura region exploratory work only started in the 1960s. Owing to the decline of folk tradition a delay of half a century actually causes an irrecoverable loss. Because of the defectiveness of the collections we had to resign from completeness. In spite of, and perhaps because of this state of affairs it is justified to collate and publish everything we may know. Ferenc Gönczi’s comprehensive ethnographic work published in 1914 also touches on our region. The folklore chapter and scores of the book provided information for our investigations.
