Tibor Ág
Tibor Ág was a folk music researcher, choirmaster, music educator, and cultural organiser, belonging to the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. For decades, he was virtually the sole person responsible for the collection, publication, and dissemination of the Hungarian folk music tradition in Upper Hungary (today mostly in Slovakia).
His extensive oeuvre encompasses a vast body of folk music fieldwork, numerous books, studies, and articles. The quantity and value of the folk music material he collected – recorded on various sound carriers and preserved in written form through transcription – can be compared only to that amassed by the greatest Hungarian folk music collectors. Equally significant was Tibor Ág’s community-based cultural organising work, carried out under difficult historical circumstances and in a minority context. This included the establishment of professional and amateur folk ensembles, the professional guidance of village singing groups, choral conducting, and the initiation, coordination, and organisation of nationwide folk song competitions. His pedagogical activity – whether within or outside institutional education – was always directed towards the use, presentation, and effective reintegration of “his own”, that is, the Hungarian folk song repertoire of Slovakia.
The principal areas of Tibor Ág’s interest were therefore folk song collecting, music pedagogy and choral conducting, and the folk art movement. As Imre Olsvai formulated it: the scholar, the pedagogue, and the public cultural worker. These three forms of activity were naturally intertwined, each nourishing the others, with one or another assuming greater emphasis at different periods of Tibor Ág’s career.
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His personal aptitudes and musical training provided an excellent foundation for his later work as a folk music researcher and choral conductor. Following the example of his father and elder brother, he began playing the violin at the age of ten. He later studied piano under Sándor Albrecht at the municipal music school, and for several years also played the cello and the clarinet. In the years following the Second World War, Tibor Ág and his family endured the grievous ordeals inflicted upon the Hungarian population of Upper Hungary. In May 1945 the family was deported from Pozsony (Bratislava) to Ligetfalu (Petržalka), to the internment camp established for Hungarians. As a result of discriminatory measures targeting Germans and Hungarians, they became stateless, and Tibor Ág was unable to continue his studies. After regaining Czechoslovak citizenship, from 1 August 1949 he was officially employed by the Cultural Department of the Central Committee of Csemadok [a cultural society of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia]. He completed his secondary school examinations, then enrolled at the Teacher Training College, and between 1951 and 1953 attended the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University, specialising in musicology and ethnography.
In 1953, when plans were made to establish a professional Hungarian song and dance ensemble, he had to choose between continuing his studies and committing himself to the folk music movement. He chose the latter and became the artistic director of NÉPES, a folk ensemble rooted in the Hungarian community in Slovakia. Reflecting later on this decision, he stated: “I have never regretted it, because what I learned there through experience was worth more than a degree certificate.”
At first, therefore, community-based organisational work took precedence, and folk song collecting primarily served the purpose of finding suitable material for the musical accompaniment of stage dances and for collective singing on stage. They collected in order to have something to arrange and perform. After these initial steps, the scope and range of the collecting gradually expanded. Wherever Tibor Ág was employed, he pursued fieldwork with unwavering dedication and came to regard it as increasingly significant. In 1958 he prepared and accompanied Lajos Kiss, senior research fellow of the Folk Music Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, on a collecting expedition in eastern Slovakia. On this occasion, as Tibor Ág himself later acknowledged, he learned a great deal and gained important methodological experience. At Kiss’s encouragement, he requested a letter of invitation from the leadership of the Folk Music Research Group, which enabled him to undertake a three-week study visit to Budapest in 1959. There he met Zoltán Kodály, founder and director of the Folk Music Research Group, as well as his colleagues, studied the academic folk song collection, and observed how collected songs were processed and systematised.
Until the end of his life, Tibor Ág maintained close professional and personal ties with folk music researchers in Budapest. This was important not only for him personally. Hungarian folk music research consistently regarded the entire Hungarian language area as the basis of its investigations, even during those years when most scholarly disciplines concerned with Hungarian culture were forced to retreat within narrower borders and largely ignored Hungarian communities living in the ‘friendly’ neighbouring countries. Zoltán Kodály’s firmness and authority ensured that the fundamental principles of research remained unchanged even in the years after 1945. This, however, required the presence of specialists in the successor states whose fieldwork could be integrated into the central folk music collection, thereby guaranteeing an overview of material from the entire language area and a unified scholarly approach. These collaborators – supported above all by Kodály himself and later by his successors in the leadership of the Folk Music Research Group (Népzenekutató Csoport), including Benjamin Rajeczky and Lajos Vargyas – received assistance in every possible way: through advice, recording equipment, participation in joint fieldwork, and the provision of professional literature. Tibor Ág worked as such an indispensable collaborator among the Hungarian population of Slovakia, alongside János Jagamas, István Almási, and Zoltán Kallós in Transylvania, and Anikó Bodor in the Délvidék (Vojvodina).
The Budapest study visit was important in yet another respect. It was probably on this occasion that Tibor Ág became fully convinced of the indispensability of a reliable institutional background for folk music research. He returned repeatedly to this issue in later years; it was one of the main sources of his dissatisfaction and occasional bitterness. In his articles and in the introductory studies to his books, he repeatedly noted that there was no institutionalised folk music research or professional training among the Hungarian community in Slovakia. Enthusiastic volunteers were active, but transcription and systematisation required trained specialists and an institution capable of providing financial support and a framework for housing and archiving the collection. Throughout his life, Tibor Ág strove to establish such an institution. He was convinced that Csemadok could have fulfilled this role, but ultimately it did not undertake the task. Although he worked within the Csehszlovákiai Magyar Dolgozók Kulturális Szövetség (Czechoslovak Hungarian Workers’ Cultural Association) in various capacities, his scholarly collecting work was more often hindered than supported. As noted above, in the founding year of Csemadok, 1949, Tibor Ág joined the Cultural Department of the Central Secretariat with the task of organising the amateur folk art movement and supplying it with appropriate folk music material. In 1953 he became artistic director of the newly established NÉPES ensemble. Although the ensemble operated with remarkable success, it was dissolved in the winter of 1955 under the pretext of reorganisation. In 1957 a new ensemble was formed from students; Tibor Ág became choirmaster and later director of the ‘Ifjú Szívek dal- és táncegyüttes’ (‘Young Hearts Song and Dance Ensemble’). He was forced to leave this post as well in 1962. In 1967 he was invited back to Csemadok as an ethnographic specialist, and even at that point no institutional framework existed for the collection, which by then numbered several thousand items. Consequently, he left the organisation in 1976.
According to Tibor Ág’s own summary of his collecting results, his archive consisted of 164 music notebooks and 202 magnetic tape reels, containing a total of more than 16,000 individual items – primarily vocal folk music recordings – gathered across the vast area stretching from the Csallóköz to the Bodrogköz.
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Several of Tibor Ág’s books are regarded as foundational works in the scholarly literature of folk music research.
The first of these is Édesanyám rózsafája. Palóc népdalok (My Mother’s Rose Tree. Palóc Folk Songs), [Palóc is a subgroup of Hungarians in Northern Hungary and southern Slovakia] published in 1974 in an edition of 12,000 copies by Madách Publishing House in Bratislava, with an introduction by Árpád Tőzsér (second edition: Martos, 1995). This was the first printed folk song collection drawn from the folk song heritage of the Hungarian population of Upper Hungary. It presents 158 songs from 41 localities, organised according to the most recent classificatory principles developed by Pál Járdányi, with precise documentation, annotations, and indexes. Tibor Ág did not compile the volume exclusively from his own fieldwork. Contributors included choreographers János Quittner and András Takács, poet István Gyurcsó, music teacher Olga Hemerka, and students Árpád Tőzsér and László Cselényi. In the concluding chapter, ‘Néhány megjegyzés a gyűjtésről és szerkesztésről’ (lit. Some Remarks on Collecting and Editing), Tibor Ág also provides an account of the contemporary state of Hungarian folk music and folk dance research in Slovakia: over 7,000 folk songs, approximately 500 folk ballads, nearly 4,000 children’s rhymes and counting-out verses, and several thousand metres of folk dance film footage had been collected. Five years later, the volume Vétessék ki szóló szívem. Szlovákiai magyar népballadák (lit. Cast Out My Lonely Heart. Hungarian Folk Ballads in Slovakia) was published (Gondolat, Budapest, 1979). The book, presenting 162 variants of 54 ballad types, appeared under the names of Tibor Ág and Ferenc Sima (who transcribed the texts). Tibor Ág began his systematic ballad collecting in 1960, after Lajos Vargyas drew his attention to several rare types from the Zobor region. As he later wrote: “The folk ballads that surfaced entirely spontaneously in certain places made me realise how much we had neglected this genre.”
After numerous smaller publications, studies, and articles, in 1999 Tibor Ág published the volumes that present the folk music of larger regional units: Felsütött a nap sugára. Kelet-szlovákiai népdalok (lit. The Sun’s Ray Has Risen. Folk Songs from Eastern Slovakia) (Csemadok Dunaszerdahelyi Területi Választmánya [Csemadok Regional Committee of Dunajská Streda], Dunaszerdahely [Dunajská Streda]), and Az Aranykert muzsikája. Csallóközi népdalok (lit. The Music of the Golden Garden. Folk Songs from the Csallóköz) (Kalligram, Bratislava), the latter published in the Csallóközi Kiskönyvtár series. Eastern Slovakia was, from both an ethnographic and an ethnomusicological perspective, a region that had been little explored; for this reason, Tibor Ág’s work there was of particular importance. Between 1952 and 1987 he conducted fieldwork mainly in the Slovakian part of the Bodrogköz and in the villages of the Ung Tisza region, visiting 31 localities and collecting nearly 1,100 songs. This volume was already accompanied by an audio cassette containing a selection of original recordings from the fieldwork. In contrast, many collectors had worked in the Csallóköz (Žitný ostrov) since the early twentieth century: Béla Bartók in 1910, László Lajtha in 1913, János Manga on several occasions, the Csallóköz-born composer Zoltán Pongrácz in 1933, and Imre Olsvai together with dance researcher György Martin in 1968. Between 1957 and 1967 György Szomjas-Schiffert travelled extensively through the region, collecting a rich repertoire of night-watchmen’s and gatekeepers’ songs, later published in book form. Tibor Ág carried out folk music fieldwork in the Csallóköz between 1959 and 1992, visiting 56 localities on 93 occasions. In this volume he deliberately avoided songs that had already appeared in print, while including – in addition to his own collections – a number of recordings made by young teachers who participated in the ethnographic summer camps he organised in the 1970s and 1980s: Mária Ürge, Mária Jókai, Éva Schuszter, Eszter Weiszer, and János Simon.
Tibor Ág conducted research across the entire Upper Hungarian region, but paid particular attention to the Nyitra (Nitra) area because of its distinctive values, its status as a linguistic enclave, and its significant role in the history of Hungarian folk music research. The material he collected there was so extensive that it could only be published in several volumes, grouped according to genres, occasions, and musical characteristics. In 2001 the beautifully produced volume ‘Csináltassunk hírharangot’. Nyitra-vidéki népballadák (lit. ‘Let Us Have a News Bell Made’. Folk Ballads from the Nitra Region) was published, with a CD supplement and outstanding photographs of the singers taken by Zoltán Móser. In 2004 this was followed by Semmit sem vétettem Nyitra városának. Nyitra-vidéki magyar népdalok (lit. I Have Done No Wrong to the City of Nyitra. Hungarian Folk Songs from the Nitra Region), with an introduction by Imre Olsvai. (The photographer Zoltán Móser accompanied Tibor Ág on numerous collecting trips, to whom we owe the excellent photographs included in these publications.) As Tibor Ág explains, he deliberately avoids using the previously common regional designation Zoborvidék, as it does not encompass the totality of Hungarian villages in the Nyitra (Nitra) region that belong together. His local fieldwork experience convinced him that not only the 13 settlements generally regarded as Zobor-region villages, but 21 villages with a still cohesive culture belong to the Nyitra area, including Lédec (Ladce), formerly part of Bars County. These are settlements dating back to the period of the Hungarian Conquest, and they constitute one of the principal areas of Zoltán Kodály’s early fieldwork. (Between 1906 and 1917 Kodály returned here almost every year, collecting approximately one thousand songs from 15 localities.) Tibor Ág collected ballads in the Nyitra region between 1992 and 1998, and in his volume he published variants of 40 ballad types.
Among Tibor Ág’s smaller publications, mention should be made of those presenting the song heritage of individual settlements. These include the Pered (Tešedíkovo) volume Bíborpiros szép rózsa. Népzenei gyűjtés Peredről (lit. Crimson Red, Beautiful Rose. Folk Music Collection from Pered [Tešedíkovo]) (Dunaszerdahely, 1996); the Dióspatony (Orechová Potôň) volume co-authored with Ernő Barsi and László Koncsol, Kemény a föld a patonyi határba’. Dióspatony népzenei hagyománya (lit. The Ground Is Hard at the Edge of Patony. The Folk Music Tradition of Orechová Potôň) (Dunaszerdahely, 1997); and the Martos (Martovce) volume co-authored with Ferenc L. Jóba, Az árgyélus kismadár. Martos falu népzenei hagyománya (lit. The Wandering Little Bird. The Folk Music Tradition of the Village of Martos) (Dunaszerdahely, 2006).
Tibor Ág firmly believed that folk tradition should be given a more prominent role in school education. In his publications he paid particular attention to children’s games, children’s songs, and rhymes (for example Ki játszik ilyet? Válogatás népi gyermekjáték hagyományainkból [lit. Who Plays Like This? A Selection from Our Folk Children’s Game Traditions] 1992). Alongside the ballad genre, he considered the publication of ritual songs to be of primary importance. One of his final books presents the customs associated with festive calendar days: Zendülj torok. Naptári népi szokások színpadra alkalmazva (lit. Let the Throat Resound! Calendar Folk Customs Adapted for the Stage) (Dunaszerdahely, 2012). As he writes: “Our publication seeks to offer assistance to teachers in compiling the substantive material for school events. […] Tradition performed in the mother tongue strengthens pupils’ sense of national identity.”
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Tibor Ág devoted the greater part of his life to folk music collecting and the publication of the collected material, but his activities as a choral conductor and movement organiser should not be overlooked. Already during his military service, he organised a well-regarded choir within his unit. When he moved to Galanta (Galanta) in 1956, he took on the leadership of the newly founded Kodály Zoltán Daloskör (Zoltán Kodály Singing Circle), serving as its choirmaster for many years. In 1964 he became founding conductor of the Central Choir of Hungarian Teachers in Czechoslovakia and led the Teachers’ Choir for more than a decade. In the 1970s, he taught intonation and choral conducting at the Hungarian Section of the Nitra Pedagogical Faculty, and conducted the mixed choir of the Hungarian Section. In Nagymegyer (Veľký Meder), he successfully led the mixed choir later named after Lajos Bárdos until 1999. In the 1960s village folk song choirs were established in rapid succession; Tibor Ág became the leader of 15 such choirs. He was the founder, organiser, and adviser of the folk music movement and competition series Tavaszi szél vizet áraszt (lit. Spring breezes cause the waters to flood), launched in 1968. By 1972 there were already 154 regularly functioning folk song circles, holding regional and district-level folk song meetings. In 1996 the Csemadok Regional Committee continued the Tavaszi szél vizet áraszt folk song singing competition under the title Bíborpiros szép rózsa (lit. Crimson Red, Beautiful Rose). Tibor Ág also became the professional director of this nationwide folk music competition.
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Tibor Ág was widely respected in both Slovakia and Hungary, and his work was recognised through numerous honorary memberships, awards, and decorations. Among the most significant were the following:
from 1983, honorary foreign member of the Magyar Néprajzi Társaság (Hungarian Ethnographic Society);
since 1989, honorary president of the Szlovákiai Magyar Néprajzi Társaság (Hungarian Ethnographic Society in Slovakia);
from 2005, full member of the Magyar Művészeti Akadémia (Hungarian Academy of Arts);
in 2008, awarded the Gold Cross of Merit of the Republic of Hungary;
in 2012, elected honorary member of the Magyar Kodály Társaság (Hungarian Kodály Society).
We conclude this account of his career with the words spoken by Sándor Csoóri on the occasion of Tibor Ág’s 85th birthday: “In a single person, he gives form to a movement, an institution, a separate academy, and an idea of enduring relevance: that a nation confronts its existential questions not only through revolutions, masses, and parties, but also through exceptional individuals after whom the world is no longer the same. The eighty-five-year-old Tibor Ág is one such individual.”
[2016]