Hungarian Folk Music

In the Italian tradition the cantautore is an author who sings, and his or her music impresses to the audience. So we can distinguish two categories: the performer and the recipient.

First time in the Hungarian folk music these three (the songwriter, the singer and the recipient) were one and the same. This unit is one of the main points of the Hungarian folk music. I can explain it with the circumstances of the music's creation: int he early times people from the peasant society have just started to sing their feelings, experiences. With the music they helped themselves to live the most important points of their life. Well-known example is the weeping song, which allows women to say goodbye to their relatives or son whom killed in the war. After singing loudly about her pain and loss, she feels a kind of relief . But she doesn't need an audience who listens her, she doesn't want to publish her thoughts and feelings – she just needs a kind of catharsis. Her song is adressed for the world, not for the people.

An example from Lapland seems to be similar to the experience of the weeping song. When a Lappish man is walking ont he tundra alone, on a lonely path and suddenly he notices a bird, which flies beautifully int he blue sky. And the man is looking at that bird, with admiration, and he has to sing the joiku for the bird. Or he meets his favourite reindeer and then he sings the joiku for it. These songs don't born because there is an audience around that man, but because he is overcome by a spectacle and he has to put his experiences into shape. What else is this, if not Aristotelian catharsis?

And that mourner Hungarian woman does the same: while she is singing a lyrical song, she is trying to fight to overcome her diffculties. So we can see, in what way can be the creator, the performer and the receptive the same.

2., Lyrics

Some remarkable themes in the world of cantautori