Szászcsávás: meeting Dumnezeu

After Szék, our next stop was Szászcsávás (Ceuaș), a primarily Hungarian-speaking village nestled in the hills.

I was excited and honored to be able to meet the legendary musician Jámbor István “Dumnezeu”, (whose nickname literally means “G-d” in Romanian— I got more details about his early life when interviewing him, and will post a transcript of that interview on this blog shortly…)

It had rained in the last few days, so the walk to his house went up a muddy lane into a small courtyard surrounded by a few houses, where his grandson and some other young men were chopping wood.

We sat in the back room of his house, which is has an old-fashioned wood-burning stove. From time to time, ducklings would wander into the front room from the yard, and Buba, Dumnezeu’s wife, would shoo them out.

Dumnezeu is confined to a wheelchair because his right leg had to be amputated a few years ago. While talking to us, he re-iterated many times that his ability to play was drastically reduced two years ago, when he had a stroke. After the stroke, he lost his memory for a week, spent a week and a half in the hospital, and “couldn’t even hold a pencil” when he got out. He has regained the ability to play since then, but still has reduced flexibility in his fingers— he has a hard time unbending his first finger on his left hand. Nevertheless, he graciously played some tunes for us.

He also talked to us about his experience touring around the world with the Szászcsávás Band. He has toured to the United States multiple times, Switzerland, even to Japan. He said that he’s proud of what he’s done for his children, adding “I am taking these (tunes) to the earth, you have to take them further”.

We went back the next day with a focus on collecting lyrics for vocal songs— Dumnezeu knows hundreds of songs in Hungarian, Romanian and Romani. Here’s one song he shared with us in Romani. (edit: See my blog post from December 13 for a translation!)

I heard other musicians playing this same melody in later visits to Szászcsávás:


Szék: "Like chicks under the hen"

From our visit with Sallai István “Pista bácsi” on October 13, 2021.

On our second full day in Szék, we set out to find Sallai István “Pista bácsi”, a local singer. “Bácsi” means uncle and is commonly used to refer to older men.

Getting directions in a small town has been difficult to get used to. No one uses house numbers— rather, it’s usually something like “go down the street until you see a yellow house, across from there is a bridge, go across the bridge and walk in the direction of the cemetery until you see a blue house on the left…”

We went to Pista bácsi’s house and called out for him, and his neighbor said we should go up the street until we reached a playground, and to ask someone around there where he might be. We asked someone there, and they said that he was in a cornfield on the other side of the road. We walked through the cornfield and found Pista bácsi chopping down a tree. Pista bácsi is 81 years old, but he told us that he tells people he’s 60 because his hair hasn’t yet turned white. He invited us to his house to listen to some songs, putting some ears of corn in his boots to transport them out of the field.

At his house, he offered us some cherry pálinka he had made, and pointed out the giant barrel of plums fermenting that he will use to make pálinka. Everyone in the village seemingly has giant containers of plums— there was a bumper crop this year.

He kindly sang some songs for us, and I interviewed him (with Attila’s help as translator). Some take-aways from our conversation:

— He didn’t learn songs in school. He learned some from his grandfather on his father’s side and from other older acquaintances. He compared his learning of songs to a TV show called “Nagymama Palacsintája” (grandma’s pancakes)… ie, they are like family recipes that are passed down.

— He is very proud of his participation in the Szék dance troupe, which would go out to competitions between 1960 and 1980. He recalled a competition in Cluj where dance troupes from 32 villages took part, and the group from Szék won (he said “Szék always won”). He remembered Romanian dancers with bells on their feet.

— He learned to dance from the older boys at the táncház. He said that when he was young, the church bell would ring on Sunday afternoon and everyone would go to the táncház.

Note: Szék has 3 main streets: Felszeg, Forrószeg, and Csipkeszeg. They are laid out like arms of an octopus radiating out from a central point. Each street used to have its own weekly táncház, making Szék an important destination for ethnomusicologists, including the founders of the táncház movement in Hungary.

— Pista bácsi talked in detail about violence that could happen in the táncház: “A guy from Felszeg couldn’t come to Csipkeszeg unless we were friends and I took him in, otherwise he would be beaten. Just like I couldn’t go to Felszeg or Forrószeg, unless I had a friend and he invited me. Otherwise … I could be beaten, or even stabbed… It isn’t like this now.”

— Violence could also happen at the táncház if one man cut in front of another in the line to dance in front of the musicians (who would play on a high raised bench so that their sound would project over the dancers). This would cause shame to the man who was overtaken. Pista bácsi talked at length about how he would carry knives and even brass knuckles, saying that although he was short, he was not afraid to fight. When I asked “what caused this violence?” Pista bácsi said, “well, the violence was caused by fighting” and “it’s like chicks under the hen” (meaning, it’s just what people do).

— One of the songs he sang for us referred to historical event in Szék. In 1935, a man named Perzsi Pista was killed by a man named Seresté. The story is that during a fight, Perzsi pushed Seresté to the ground. From the ground, Seresté flailed with his knife, and hit Perzsi in the neck, striking an artery.

The song is called Hallottátok, Forrószegen mi történt, which means “Did you hear what happened in Forrószeg”? Here’s a translation of the Hungarian lyrics by Fenyvesi Attila:

  1. Did you hear what happened in Forrószeg?

    That handsome brown-haired lad was killed.

    They took his life like that of a partridge

    They took him in dead to his mother.

  2. Seresté, didn’t your heart ache

    When you killed that brown-haired lad

    Yes indeed, it was aching. I thought it would crack

    When he said “oh my G-d, I’m dying”

Here’s a recording I made during our session of Pista bácsi singing this song:

Later that night, we met with Pista bácsi and Sipos Marci to hear more songs. Pista bácsi also demonstrated that he is still capable of dancing the Széki “tempo” which is a dance similar to legényes.

One more highlight from Szék: meeting Zsuzsi and Cara! Cara is from California and Zsuzsi grew up in Szék, and now they split their time between Szék and Budapest. They run a textile exporting business, and their textiles are absolutely gorgeous. Thanks for showing us around, Zsuzsi and Cara!

Szék: “When I dream of sheep, the next day it will rain”

Video taken by Fenyvesi Attila. You can watch another short video from the same night here.

The village of Szék (Sic) was the first stop on a 2-week trip with my friend Fenyvesi Attila.

We set out straightaway to find some musicians to invite to play— Sipos Marci (brácsás, also plays violin very well although he’s modest about it) and Moldován György “Gyurika” (prímás). Gyurika’s father was also a prímás.

For those uninitiated reading this blog, “prímás” (pronounced “pree-mosh”) is a term for the lead violinist in a band. “Brácsás” is the term for a musician who plays the brácsa (pronounced “brot-sha”, also known as kontra) which is an instrument with 3 or 4 strings and a flat bridge, which plays chords.

I enjoyed hearing Széki tunes from these great musicians and also hearing about the work they do when they aren’t playing music. Gyurika works as a contractor, and Sipos Marci works as a shepherd (more on that later).

They emphasized that the amount of live folk music events happening in Szék had been decreasing for years even before the pandemic.

Sipos Marci kindly invited us over to his house a couple of days later. He has a self-effacing, modest demeanor. He started by showing us some photos (see captions above) and also told us some stories about what being a shepherd is like. He splits the shepherding duties with one other guy, and they each will spend a few days at a time out with the sheep.

The most memorable story he told us: When he dreams about his sheep, that means that the weather the next day will be rainy, so he comes prepared with a raincoat. But, one night, he got drunk and didn’t remember dreaming about his sheep, so he was unprepared the next day when it started hailing. In order to get out of the hail, he took shelter under his donkey (!)

These are the types of stories people told us in Szék.

We were joined by Ludányi Noémi, a prímás who moved to Szék from Budapest four years ago. She brought her adorable 2-year-old son, András. András was lying at Noémi’s feet and watching her as she played : )

She grew up in Ecséd, a village near Hatvan, Hungary and started out playing classical music, because népzene (folk music) training wasn’t available there. In secondary school she had the opportunity to start studying folk music in Vác. Her favorite styles are Széki and Palatkai— she’s had the opportunity to play Széki music extensively with Pali Marci and Palatkai music with Kodoba Florin. Pali Marci encouraged her to sing songs while she’s playing.

After playing, Noémi showed us her house, which is up the road from Sipos Marci’s. Like many others in Szék, she’s raising farm animals including pigs, goats and two horses. We watched the sun set over the hills from her field.

About this blog

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:

  1. This blog consists of my opinions and mine alone, not those of the Fulbright program or the U.S. State Dept.

  2. 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?