MUSIC
No written memories of ancient Hungarian music have survived. To reconstruct the musical traditions of the conquering Hungarians, researchers must compare folk music noted down in the 20th century with the musical remains of people related to the Hungarians
According to Nestor, the author of ancient Russian chronicles, the songs of the Hungarians entranced Kiev, too, in 885. Ekkehard - in his chronicle compiled at around 1108 - wrote that the Hungarians had found a simple-minded fellow called Heribald in the deserted monastery of St Gallen. Having seen his stupidity they mercifully did not kill him. They even had dinner with him. After drinking an enormous quantity of wine, which they found in the cellar, "they began shouting to their gods in terrible voices". After this loud revelry, their interpreter, a captive priest, who spoke Hungarian, - together with Heribald - started to sing the antiphony of the Holy Cross (Sanctifica nos - Sanctify us) in a hoarse voice, as it was the feast of the Holy Cross the following day, on 3rd May. The Hungarians listened to the strange song of the captives in astonishment, until the horns and cries of their watchmen drew their attention to the approaching enemy.
In the description of the 993 Merseburg battle, Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, mentions that the pagan Hungarians hurled themselves on the Germans singing the prayer "Kyrie eleison" (Lord, have mercy on us) with the battle-cry "hui, hui". Anonymus also wrote about the revels of the Hungarians in his chronicle. Formerly, in connection with the fights near Kiev, he mentioned the battle horns, too.
The description of pagan revolts after king Stephen's death refers to the ritual-like music of the Hungarians in some way or another: in 1046, János, son of Vata, collected numerous shamans and prophet- priests around himself, who praised their lord with enchanting songs. In 1060, when the crowd demanded the restoration of pagan religion from king Béla I - who hid behind the walls of the Fehérvár castle, their leaders attacked Christianity with disgraceful carmens (charming songs).
According to researchers, there might have been many style levels in the development of the music of the Hungarians. The first major period of music comes with the time when they lived together with Ugric peoples; the second one may have developed in course of the centuries of contact with Turkic peoples.
The group of dirges - the oldest layer in Hungarian folk music, presumably from the age when they lived together with Ugric peoples - represent archaic forms, and show a relationship with a certain type of Ostyak songs. In this type of songs features of ritual and memorial, praising and weeping (for the dead heroes) are still interwoven, although they subsequently become independent genres. The memorial function continued in epic genres, the praising style lived on in hymnic works, while the role of calling spirits continued in funeral songs.
Soloistic recitative, that is, half-spoken, half-sung presentation is a typical feature of the dirges. The best-known descendants of mourning-style are the ballad of the big mountain thief, "Rosemary Grown on the Snow-covered Mountain of the Rainbow" and "Pannonia Faces Tremendous Decline".
While dirges can be connected to Ugric influence, the appearance of five-note pentaton melodies in Hungarian musical traditions can be explained by the centuries-long co-existence with the Turkic peoples. Musical beauty and the expression of emotions played an important role. A well-known example is the folk song entitled "The Peacock Has Settled" from the county of Somogy.
Feasts connected to nature can presumably be traced back to the age of the Conquest and the founding of the state. The musical components of these have survived among the people till today. Minstrel songs are memories of the feast of the winter solstice; the minstrel refrain itself has its equivalent in the refrain formulae of Byzantine rituals. Midsummer night songs - which are connected to the summer solstice - and the musical elements of other spring folk traditions refer to the reception of the influence of European agricultural states, Byzantium and other Slav peoples.
Originally, minstrels were performers of heroic songs from the pagan age in princes' courts. Today's folk minstrels are accompanied by loud musical instruments, such as flute, jug-pipe, stick with chains on it, and minstrels' pipe.
Musical remains of nature-magic were preserved in some children's songs. Lullabies were adjusted to the rhythm of rolling, they are simple melodies, or without melody, and petting was a typical characteristic feature in them. The strong rhythmic choosing-rhymes, counting-rhymes and nursery rhymes also refer to their ancient origin.
With the adoption of Christianity a significant change occurred in Hungarian music: the cultural heritage and melodic repertoire, which was already common property in European Christian thinking at around the turn of the millennium were transmitted into the Carpathian Basin together with the new religion. It is also very important that the network of institutions supporting the maintenance, cultivation and transmission of these spiritual values had already been set up. Monastic, parish and chapter schools spread literacy, science and music in Hungary, too, and they had remained the only institutes of Western Christian culture up until the end of the Middle Ages.
School education was divided into two main parts: grammatica and musica. At medieval schools children were obliged to sing for 2-3 hours a day during services. In spite of the fact that both the music sung and the unified liturgical frame connected Hungary to the European Christian community, a specific Hungarian Gregorian style - different from western Gregorian music - developed slowly.
Hungary adopted the Gregorian repertoire in the Central-European, the so-called pentatonising version. Data show that around 1028 a monk from Regensburg, called Arnoldus, arrived in Esztergom and there, together with archbishop Anastazius, created a new series of songs in honour of St Emmran of Regensburg, based on ancient writings. The choir of the cathedral sang these songs on the day of the Saint. Musicians might have been encouraged to write similar songs by the flourishing cult of saints.
The Hungarian Gregorian repertoire was supplemented by local variants from the beginning. The first cycle of Hungarian Gregorian music was a series of antiphons and responses written for the canonisation of king St Stephen - probably in Fehérvár. Its main movement was "God Save Late King Stephen", that survived in the Transylvanian codex from the end of the Middle Ages. Later, other rhyming chants were created in the honour of other Hungarian saints, like prince Emeric and king Ladislas.
The first liturgical-musical settlement connected to church and state organisation probably took place during Stephen's reign. It influenced the repertoire and the structure of the service (mainly the office), and also the melodic variants, the songs, their order, and the choice of melodic variants. The birth of Hungarian musical composition, which combined the German neumatic writing and the French-Italian orientation, was also typical of the Hungarian Gregorian music culture; its first manuscripts can be found in the Pray-codex.
At the same time, pipers and drummers were also employed in principal courts. They lived in groups in the neighbouring villages. Minstrels were associated to them, too. Latin (Western Christian) music songs from the pagan age - first of all in folk traditions - also continued.
DANCE
Concerning the early history of Hungarian dance culture - in the absence of evidence - we can only guess how people in the Carpathian Basin danced at the time of the Conquest.
On the basis of the comparative analysis of the available scanty historical sources and the folk dance of today's European peoples, three big dance regions can be described:
1. South-East-European region: where the dominant dance is the chain- or circle dance, where dances are created in groups, half-settled.
2. Eastern-European region: where individual, free, soloic, improvisative dances dominate.
3. Western-European region: where totally settled, collective, space-formative paired dances (kodrills and contra dances) constituted the basic dances.
According to theories based on the memories of dance history and numerous Western- European sources it turned out that these three regions actually represent the three periods of the historical development of European dance culture. People from the Balkans, isolated from the European cultural changes for a long period, perpetuated medieval collective chain-round dances up until today. Eastern-European peoples (including the Hungarians) preserved the renaissance "paired love dances", which became popular at the end of the Middle Ages, at the beginning of the Modern Age, while Western-European peoples preserved quadrilles and contra dances, becoming general in the 18th century.
In this wide historical, geographical and social investigation we have managed to differentiate an older and a newer layer in Hungarian dance traditions, which are definitely dissimilar to each other.
The dances of the old style layer show remarkable similarities with the dances of the neighbouring peoples in the Carpathian Basin. Circle dances at the borderline of the old and the new layer indicate South-East-European and ancient medieval connections. In a wider sense, sources from the age of the Conquest suggest that Hungarian culture showed ambiguity even at that time. In the description of the St Gallen adventure and in the set of martial games, songs and revels mentioned in Anonymus's Gesta Hungarorum, dances occur in an undifferentiated form, just as in Eastern history and folklore.
Iconography from works of art from the 10th-11th centuries, include the joculators on Lehel's horn, and Mirjam-dances on the crown of the Byzantine emperor, Monomachos, and show another dimension of medieval Hungarian dance culture. They attest to how cultural elements (including those of dance culture) from further territories of Europe reached Hungary through dynastic relationships.
