Paksa Katalin - Németh István: Muravidéki magyar népzene (Budapest - Lendva, 2018)
A régió népzenéjéről
42 MURA VIDÉKI MAGYAR NÉPZENE other West Pannonian ethnographic regions. The folk music of historical Hetés, Göcsej, Őrség and more distant Hungarian small regions also constitute the legacy of the Mura region which is only faintly influenced by other linguistic communities. Conversely, however, the Hungarian influence upon the folk music of the Slovenians along the Mura and Croatians in Muraköz [the Drava-Mura interfluve] is more considerable. Sometimes neighbouring peoples set Slav words to the tunes of Hungarians along the Mura or other Hungarian tunes, which is a natural outcome of a thousand-year-old coexistence within the Hungarian Kingdom. The monumental collection by Katalin Paksa and István Németh pays tribute to the numerically few but highly valuable researchers of the past decades who have made outstanding contributions to the exploration and preservation of the Hungarian folk music of the Mura region either occasionally or for several decades. The Yugoslav-Hungarian cold war period was detrimental to folk song collection in the Mura region, but from the 1960s a few specialists from Voivodina and later several scholars from the motherland carried on important fieldwork. Mention must be made, among others, of Károly Horváth Sr., who was a decisive collector, cultivator, instructor and popularizer of the Hungarian folk song repertoire of the Mura region from 1968 until his death in 1998. At times he led four folksong circles, and the first folksong collection acknowledged by scholarship is also to his credit. After his death the most prestigious folk music festival often with the participation of ten-fifteen folksong circles from the Mura region and a dozen others from Hungary as part of the Vass Lajos musical competition or a regional event of KOTA was named after him. His son Károly Horváth Jr., a young master of folk art, continues his father’s noble mission to this day. Some of the specific, musically interesting folk customs of the region were filmed by specialists of the Újvidék media back in the sixties; a few decades later the renowned authors of this monograph already pursued professional collecting work, and then the Hungarian Radio of the Mura region and the Hungarian nationality TV made valuable recordings and films about the folk music of the region (e.g. the filmed Hungarian wedding in the Mura region). In recent years several audio media were released with selections from the folksong repertoire sung by the Hungarian folksong circles in the Mura region. From now on this important publication will also be a useful practical source for our folksong circles and all those interested. We are deeply indebted to the authors and supporters for having collected, assessed and monographically elaborated the values of Hungarian folk music in the Mura region as conservers and shapers of our national awareness and sense of identity. This book, and the work behind it, is an important value and testimony of our community, and in the universal Hungarian folksong treasury it is perhaps one of the smallest but brightly shining and indispensable mosaic stones. László Göncz writer, historian, MP of the Hungarian community of Slovenia
