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EASTERN EUROPE 77 |
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Ugric (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, and several minority languages in Russia); Turkic (the Turks, the Chuvash of the Russian interior, etc.); Romance (Rumanian); Albanian; and Caucasian. Musical influences come from sources as diverse as the chants of the Byzantine Church, the pentatonic tunes of Mongolia, and the complex rhythms of the Arabic and Hindu spheres. And certainly there are also important links between Eastern and Western Europe, tunes found in both areas, identical uses and functions of music in the culture. In view of this great diversity, we must be forgiven for selecting a few samples to characterize the area, and for omitting entirely consideration of some nations. But let us bear in mind that each of the Eastern European countries, from gigantic Russia to tiny Albania, has a rich folk music heritage; each has enough songs to fill a multi-volume anthology and a musical culture of sufficient wealth to keep scholars busy for several lifetimes. |
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Melodic sequence: Hungarians, Czechs, Cherernis
East European scholars have indeed been busy studying their native traditions, and nowhere has this been more true than in Hungary. For decades in the nineteenth century it was thought that the folk music of Hungary was the music of the gypsies who supplied ethnic entertainment in the cities, and not until the twentieth century was the great wealth of true Hungarian peasant music (which has little in common with the gypsv tunes) discovered, largely by Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly. Since the Hungarians are linguistically related to the Finns, it was thought that the styles of these two peoples would have something in common. This turned out to be only partially the case, but other Finno-Ugric speaking peoples living for centuries in isolation from the Hungarians, inside Russia, do have music somewhat similar to that of Hungary. The most important of these groups is the Cheremis, who live in a semi-autonomous republic of the USSR some five hundred miles east of Moscow. These peoples have something in common that is also found far to the east, among the Mongolians, and even to some extent further on, in American Indian music; and this strengthens our belief that the essential features of the oldest Hungarian folk music are very old, |
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