Halmos Béla turned 60

  Széki ritka tempó

Béla Halmos (b. in Szombathely in 1946) graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Budapest Technical University in 1970. He started to learn music in his childhood, playing the violin and the viola. He took part in the organization of the folk music education at music schools and. Since 1992 he has been a senior member at the Institute of Hungarian Culture, then laid the foundations of the Dance Hall Archives. In 2000 he was appointed the head of section. Since 2001 he has worked in the Folk Art Workshop of the House of Traditions as the head of the Dance Hall Archives. He is the board member of the Dance House Association, founder, later extraordinary member of the Hungarian Music Council. He participates in the work of the board of trustees awarding the Ferenc Liszt and Ferenc Erkel Prizes and of the "Association for the European Folklore Centre" running the European Folklore Institute.
                                                                                 
Without him there wouldn't be táncház in the form we know it today (dance house movement, of which a bit later).

I love to dance when he plays the violin: you have the feeling that he is playing exclusively for you. Countless times in the táncház, a couple of times on stage with the legendary Bartók Dance Ensemble. When my son was a little baby, a few times I would take him where Halmos played for the kids, and he would forget about the whole world, didn't care that he could be playing and jumping around with the other children, he would just gaze at Béla bácsi, completely mesmerized, and listen, listen...

For photos of his birthday celebration in Budapest, go to the Galéria section of Folkrádió

Happy Birthday Béla!

Info and photo: Aranytíz.hu

You will love this Béla Halmos album:
Hungarian Folk Music from Transylvania

"24th hour": Online data base of traditional village music

Mulató nóta (Rollicking song)
Flute and hit gardon from Gyimes

To give you a taste of how did traditional Hungarian village music sound like - or in many places, it still does - you can start your listening journey at the online data base of the "24th hour" collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute for Musicology.
They have near 6000 pieces on record.
Many of the performers that you can hear were born back in the 1800s!

An exciting album where you can hear the old recordings that were collected in the villages, along with famous arrangements: 

Tiszta forrás (Pure Springs): Hungarian Folk Tunes and Their Arrangements in Works by Bartók and Kodály

Welcome

Welcome to my blog on Hungarian folk music!

Hungarian folk music. Tschardasch, Czardas, Gypsy musicians with the violin and other strings, cimbalom, they play the sweetest melodies for you at the table when you eat out in Hungary. Pieces by Brahms or Liszt. And Márta Sebestyén, singing with her mesmerizing voice in the movie The English Patient, or the band Muzsikás. Probably these are your first impressions about it, but there is much, much more to it.

It might happen to you that you run into "Hungarian Folk Music" or "Hungarian Gypsy Music" when you surf on the net, in a CD store, attend a concert or go to a restaurant where they play live music during the dinner - but sometimes, all these have not much to do with real Hungarian village music. Indeed, composers of many of those songs are known, therefore they don't fall into the definition of traditional music. Often, these pieces are brilliant, performed by virtuoso musicians.

A local band from North-Eastern Hungary, my birth place:



And the famous Monti Csárdás (Czardas)



If you want to know about the extraordinarily rich folk music of my country (to be more exact: the historical Hungary, which was before World War I, three times as big as it is today), this blog is the right place for you. Resources on Hungarian folk music of the past and of the present: collections, artists playing Hungarian folk in its traditional form or newly arranged (which comes under the all-encompassing heading of world music), places where you can listen to this music live or on the net, album releases, events and other news from the scene of Hungarian folk music & dance which are one of the most precious "export goods" of my homeland - and which is impossible to live without, once you got to get the taste of it...

You will love these albums: