The purpose of this blog is to record my thoughts and experiences during my time as a Fulbright research grantee from October 2021- June 2022. I’m very excited and humbled to be supported by Fulbright to do this research! A couple of disclaimers:
This blog consists of my opinions and mine alone, not those of the Fulbright program or the U.S. State Dept.
Writing is not really my strongest suit, and neither is photography… for a truly great blog, check out Bob Cohen’s here. It’s my favorite blog.
The focus of my Fulbright research is Transylvanian folk music pedagogy: how folk musicians here learned specific regional styles, and how they’re passing on their traditions. I will work with musicians from Romanian, Roma and Hungarian backgrounds, in a variety of settings (institutional and casual; formal and informal instruction; group and individual lessons). My goal is to find methodologies and approaches that can be used to teach klezmer music.
I was introduced to Transylvanian folk music in 2016 by my Farnakht collaborator Mattias Kaufmann. I first travelled here in 2018, and since then have been obsessed with this region and its folk culture. Transylvania is interesting to me because of the micro-regional styles that have been preserved: musicians from villages even 10km apart historically have had vastly different-sounding ways of playing.
Some questions that my research will explore:
— what is the relationship between folk music training and folk dance pedagogy?
— how are folk musicians using notation and other visual representation such as chord charts?