Paksa Katalin - Németh István: Muravidéki magyar népzene (Budapest - Lendva, 2018)
A régió népzenéjéről
ABOUT THE FOLK MUSIC OF THE REGION 45 Hungarian Folk Music Anthology CD-ROM (III 5 08a) encompassing the folk music of the whole Hungarian language territory, together with an old-style song from Kapca (III_5_05a) and a wedding song from Radamos (III_5_07b). The greatest number of Mura region songs have been published by János Bereczky in his four-tome synthesizing work “A magyar népdal új stílusa” [The new style of the Hungarian folksong]. Yet the region is still underrepresented by its nine tunes among the two and a half thousand items (Bereczky 2013, 115, 214, 822, 828, 1602, 1661, 1676, 2013, 2345). Most recently a tune from Őrihodos has been included in a book about the correlations of 18th century notated sources and folk music (Domokos-Paksa 2016, music ex. 158i). It is a great loss of Hungarian folk music research that the folk music of the Mura region as such is missing from the complete critical collection. Though the volumes published so far of “A Magyar Népzene Tára” [the Collection of Hungarian Folk Music] include some 15 000 tunes, not a single tune from the Mura region was, or could be presented. That is also why we feel it our duty to make all the accessible folk music material public so that it be suitable for research and popularizing purposes alike. Our monograph contains 356 Mura region items, most of them sound recordings, plus the pieces presented or referred to in Károly Horváth’s book. (Songs recorded during a collecting session but alien to folk music are obviously omitted.) Hungarian ethnomusicology investigates the music of the entire language territory in seven countries, irrespective of the frontiers. The folk music of Zala and Vas counties is the same on both sides of the border. The regional monograph of the Mura area is still justified because as a separate publication it can direct the attention more emphatically to the undiscovered treasures of the area so far neglected by folk music research, and also, it can strengthen local identity and the care for tradition. In the book the contacts of the Mura region tunes beyond the border are naturally mentioned. In the notes to the songs the designation “Zala county variant” refers to the Hungarian versions, first of all based on József Vajda’s book (Vajda 1978). It is also added there how well-known they are in areas of closer and more distant Hungarian folk music dialects, and what place they have in the whole of Hungarian folk music. * * * The Mura region is the western peripheral belt of the Transdanubian dialectal area of the Hungarian folk music. It comprises the western, Slovenian part of the ethnographic sub-region Hetés and the surroundings of Lendva in Zala county and the southern Slovenian section of Őrség in Vas county. Since 1920 the Hungarians of this area have lived in diverse state formations such as the Serbian-Croatian-Slovenian Kingdom, then Yugoslavia, and at present Slovenia. As regards the size of the population, in 1921 some 20-25,000 Hungarians were registered, in 1991 some 8,500 and in 2002 some 6,500. After World War I connection with the Hungarian mother land was broken for a long span of forty years, and only in the late Kádárian period did it become possible to
