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Gypsy Musicians and Hungarian Peasant Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2019

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To this day Liszt's Des Bohémiens et de leur Musique en Hongrie first published in 1859 remains the only attempt to deal with the music of the Hungarian gypsies in a comprehensive manner. Despite its factual errors and romantic exaggeration, this enthusiastically and powerfully written study created a tradition that continues to exert a strong influence both in Hungary and abroad, often obscuring the results of a century of research in Hungarian music generally and that of the gypsies in particular. Only a few of the many papers written since Liszt's are thorough in their treatment of details. Hungarian musicohistorical works and publications on peasant music, especially those of Bartók, Kodály, Ervin Major, and B. Szabolcsi, however, provide some additional information. The modern point of view has been stated most clearly and categorically by Bartók, who in 1931 examined the question: Gypsy Music? Hungarian Music?

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Research Article
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Copyright © 1971 By the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 

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References

1 A German and a Hungarian edition appeared in Pest in 1861, another German edition in Leipzig in 1883.Google Scholar

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21 Zoltán Kodály, A magyar népzene [Hungarian folk music] (Budapest, 1960), p. 58.Google Scholar

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63 Foreign countries, too, got to know the colorful, braided, booted costume of the Hungarian nobleman as the characteristic gypsy dress. In 1910, Debussy spoke of “une élégance barbare …,” Lettres de Claude Debussy à sa femme, Emma, Pasteur Valléry-Radot, ed. (Paris, 1957), p. 89.Google Scholar

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