4 - Modernism and Authenticity

Summary

The loaded term “genuine folk song” is a familiar one in the area of Hungarian folk music. It was inherited from Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967), who successfully argued that what had hitherto been considered Hungarian folk music—that is, verbunkos-type music—was in fact a recent and much perverted imitation of older and more authentic peasant folk songs. Bartók and Kodály spearheaded a new school of composition whose grand project was to shape a new musical identity for Hungary by accepting the musical culture of the peasantry, sidelining or outright rejecting nationalistic urban genres, establishing a new theory and practice of comparative musicology (ethnomusicology), and attempting to integrate European art-music modernism with both melodies and abstract elements of this comparatively unknown Hungarian folk music. Such ideas, styles, and aesthetics overturned everything with which committed nationalists had grown up, and it is therefore not surprising that in the first three decades of their activities, the two composers and their small circle of supporters faced widespread opposition and marginalization. However, by the mid-1930s the scales were beginning to tip as Bartók and Kodály began to gain official recognition and even governmental support. The paradigm shifted definitively after World War II, creating a new dogma of cultural authenticity.

Verbunkos genres did not disappear as popular entertainment, however, and they were even partly rehabilitated in academic and artistic circles by Bartók and Kodály's immediate successors, as we shall see. Nevertheless, the authenticity agenda undoubtedly resulted in an aesthetic depreciation of the value of Hungarian Gypsy-band music in scholarly discourse inside and outside Hungary. This meant that the early field researchers who studied Gypsy-band music using the new methods (most notably László Lajtha and Bálint Sárosi) had to renegotiate certain belief systems in order to carry out their work. Whenever they challenged the more absolutist aspects of opinions that denied the worth of Gypsy-band music, they did it from the point of view of respectful heretics who wished to reform rather than to overturn the new scientific credo. Likewise, Liszt scholars had to exercise similarly respectful resistance to the new politics of cultural authenticity in their construction of Liszt as an important national Hungarian composer.