Hungarian Rhapsody, by Nick Benda
Guess where I am? Winter or summer I get up when the bells peal at six. Though my classes don't start till eight, I enjoy savouring the prospect of the day's work over a full breakfast. I might shop in the market at this hour because it closes at eleven. A short walk away, it is a huge covered hangar, richly stocked with local, seasonal produce (bright red with tomatoes, chillies, peppers radishes and strawberries in the summer).
The town has a grand if shabby fifty-metre pool with a thermal bath outside, open all year round. The thermal pool is warm, sulphurous and at its best in moonlight and falling snow.
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My rented flat is large, level with the tree-tops, simply furnished and with no television or telephone. I can catnap in the afternoons in perfect peace, and often do, so dazed I am by the intensity of the work.
The sunlight hours are long well into the autumn, and the weather is often bright even in the winter when the temperature can remain below zero for weeks on end. In breaks between classes I enjoy a beer in an outdoor caf with a companion, for all the world as if we were kicking off skis and recovering our energies. I take up smoking lightly - there is a lot to smoke about.
The institute I'm studying at is in a converted monastery, and most students choose to live in. My main reasons for choosing not to had been claustrophobia general and specific, specific being the sharing of a small kitchen with twenty-five other people. My fellow students are from all over the world: North America, the Far East, and the UK. Relatively few from continental Europe, interestingly. They are musicians with a variety of backgrounds and reasons for being here: teachers, college students or graduates, specialist pianists or singers. I have classes in solfege, piano, voice, folk music, conducting, and teaching methodology. They are taught in English but the teachers are all Hungarian.
This is the Zoltan Kodaly Pedagogical Institute of Music, in Kecskemet, central Hungary.
Kodaly is an approach to learning which places the main emphasis on the singing voice, coupled with a thorough assimilation of relative solfa (definition coming up). It had been a word buzzing in the background for some time, and I was becoming dimly aware that it held the key to some of my musical preoccupations. I was privately espousing a belief that transposition was an undervalued musical skill and practice. The sorts of music I was lately getting into (baroque, and free improv) were requiring a much firmer grasp of harmonic theory than I had. Here, with Kodaly, was a complete system for the understanding of classical (and some earlier and later) harmony.
Relative solfa is the exact opposite of the better-known fixed system associated with the French and most continental (and now far Eastern) classical music schools. Do refers not to the note C but to the tonic of a major key, or the third of a minor, or the second degree of a Locrian scale. It names the function of tones, not their absolute pitch. Fa and re always have a certain fa-ness and re-ness about them, whatever their temporary pitch.
All musical discovery through Kodaly is rooted in or referred back to the singing voice. Combining solfege with singing practice improved my intonation and ability to sustain a constant pitch level over a long period considerably. I can sing up and down chords and chord progressions, or if I am at the piano can sing and play in canon with myself - in three parts if I really try. The hit you get from doing this for the first time is unforgettable, and perhaps unrepeatable.
Solfege is performative analysis.The special thing about the Hungarian approach is that it combines an almost intolerable rigour with a flamboyant emotionality about music. There is no escaping the drill aspect of solfege, but there is also no escaping the magnification it brings to the meaning of the music. The personalities of my teachers in Hungary reflect this divide too - they all balance technical brilliance with expressivity in slightly different ways.
And what about Hungary itself, as a place to live for a year? I can only give a partial picture, as I was living in the mental bubble of the Kodaly Institute so much of the time. I scarcely met Hungarians on a social level. Their manners are conservative but warm. The new capitalism is worn quite lightly and the news isn't pervaded by military affairs. My intentions of learning the language took a dive once I realized how much music practice I had to do. Hungary has a uniquely calamitous 20th-century history (witnessed of course by Kodaly himself) which, even today, raises difficulties of tact in the foreign enquirer.
Right now I am occupied with the question of how to apply the experience to my resumed career in England. But my time in Hungary, while it lasted, was most absorbing.
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