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Written in fRoots issue 199/200, 2000

FERENC KISS
Nagyvárosi Bujdosók - Outlaws Of The City
Etnofon ER-CD 020 (1999)

VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Oldest Recordings Of Moravian And Slovak Folk Singing, 1909-1912
Gnosis Brno G-MUSIC 010 (1998)

As a member of Vízöntő, Kolinda and other projects, Ferenc Kiss has been involved for years with Hungarian traditional music and the movements to keep it a continuing force in the present day. In 1994 he set up the Etnofon Music Company, not just a record label issuing traditional and archive recordings and new evolutions but also the core of a performing and theatre music unit.
      There’s no point in cherishing and preserving the traditional musical language if all one does is display it as A Good Thing; you have to use it as a means of contemporary expression, and in Nagyvárosi Bujdosók - Outlaws Of The City that’s what Kiss does. It’s a personal snapshot album of the things that have shaped his life as a modern Hungarian, the CD long-form packaged with a substantial booklet of lyrics, prose pieces and photos.
      The language of that life, of course, is Hungarian, so for non-speakers the message is slimmed down to the sound of the music, its strong textures of bold voices and the exquisitely edgy tension of finely-played traditional instruments and well-integrated electronica from Kiss and twenty-two other musicians and singers. The lyrics do contain the occasional recognisable cross-linguistic reference, though: “Hé Joe, hé Jude, hé you”...

      Over a century ago, not far to the north of Hungary, in Moravia, at the eastern end of the Czech Republic and the west of the Slovak Republic, another musician was exploring the traditional music of his home region and drawing it into his own new music. In the 1880s, finding the classical of music of the city of Brno limiting, the composer Leoš Janáček became involved in the work of folksong collectors, going to the villages and writing down what he heard, sometimes bringing the rural musicians to the city, and using it in his compositions.
      In 1909 he managed to get hold of an Edison phonograph, with which his collaborators Františka Kyselková and Hynek Bím made most of the recordings now released (via tape transcriptions made in 1954 from the original cylinders) as a 31-track CD of Moravian and Slovak unaccompanied solo and group singing, plus some speech from interviews with the collectors in the 1950s, contained in a 154-page hardback CD-sized booklet of very detailed documentation with English translation and 29 printed songs with music. It’s scratchy listening, pretty much as it must have been for Janáček when Kyselková and Bím returned to him with their wax-engraved trophies, and hardly mass market, but the high quality and expensiveness of its presentation speak for the esteem which its contents, and/or the prestige of Janáček, command.


© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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