The life and work of Béla Halmos revolved from the 1960s around preserving, collecting and researching the musical heritage of the entire Hungarian nation, and passing on his knowledge in so called “dance-house” workshops (in Hungarian: táncház), camps, courses and university teaching.
He turned towards folk music while studying at the Faculty of Architecture of the Budapest University of Technology. It was in the symphony orchestra of the university that he met his later musical partner, Ferenc Sebő, with whom he began performing in 1967. In the beginning, they performed – under the name Halmos–Sebő Duo – Sebő’s musical settings of Hungarian poet Attila József’s poems, accompanied by guitar and flute (by Katalin Gyenes). They appeared on the University Stage, and in 1970 at several venues across the country with actress singer Kati Berek. In the 1969–70 edition of the Röpülj páva! national folk song competition they already entered with traditional folk songs, and Halmos reached the finals by audience vote.
A turning point came in his life when, encouraged by his brother-in-law, the ethnographer László Kósa, he and Sebő met the folk culture researcher György Martin, who provided them with authentic recordings and transcriptions, and introduced them to Sándor Tímár, choreographer of the Béla Bartók Dance Ensemble of the Chemical Workers’ Union. It was with Tímár that Halmos first went on fieldwork — to Méhkerék in Transylvania — and the experience inspired him to study authentic folk violin playing in depth. Through Tímár he met Tivadar Kovács, a Romanian gypsy prímás (lead fiddler) from Méhkerék, whom he regarded not only as an informant but also as his master.
From 1974 onwards, under Martin’s guidance, he participated in documenting the fiddlers’ repertoire in the Transylvanian village of Szék. The research team also included Mihály Sipos, Márta Virágvölgyi and András Jánosi. Halmos himself recorded the music of István Ádám “Icsán” and his two sons, István and Sándor, over many years.
The type of instrumental folk music research initiated by Halmos had no precedent in Hungary: he not only collected the music but also analysed in detail musical structures and processes, and also reconstructed the life and family history of István Ádám “Icsán”.
In the early 1970s, research and collecting temporarily receded behind his work as a performer. He played regularly with the Bartók Ensemble, and as a member of the Halmos–Sebő duo he performed at the 25. Színház (25th Theatre), where they had an independent folk-music programme. In the winter of 1971, they appeared at the Néptáncantológia (Folk Dance Anthology) festival together with the Bartók Dance Ensemble, at a time when it was still a novelty for dancers to perform to live music, accompanied by the musicians standing beside them. This led Antal Stoller of the Bihari Dance Ensemble to invite them to provide the music for the first táncház (dance-house) he organised. From 1972 onwards, Halmos was the lead fiddler – the first prímás – of the early dance-house gatherings. Alongside the Bihari Ensemble, the Bartók, the Vadrózsák and the Vasas dance ensembles also performed at these events.
Halmos and Sebő wanted to open the initially closed, ensemble-based dance-houses to a broader public audience, but three of the dance groups were unwilling to do so. As a result, from February 1973, along with the Bartók Ensemble, Halmos and Sebő organised a new, this time public, dance-house in the circular hall of the Budapest Municipal Cultural Centre. From 1973 onwards Halmos became one of the principal organisers of the public táncház events. He took part in organising the National Dance-House Meetings held annually from 1982 onwards; the first one took place as the closing event of the Budapest Spring Festival, with Halmos himself responsible for the musical programme and the gala performance.
He played a decisive role in the emergence and international success of this revival movement that preserved and disseminated instrumental folk music and folk dance during the socialist era. The táncház movement – an apolitical, grassroots musical, dance, cultural and lifestyle “revolution” – soon attracted the attention of the political leadership as well, since Halmos and his colleagues sought to restore national identity and culture through the movement. Although they were not openly repressed, under György Aczél’s cultural policy they remained classified as “tolerated”, despite the fact that senior party leaders such as Aczél himself and Iván Vitányi, director of the Institute of Popular Culture, supported the movement. Their ambivalent situation is illustrated by the fact that their events at the Kassák Club were repeatedly reported to the authorities, yet they still received state recognitions in 1975 and 1985 (Medal for Socialist Culture, and other prizes from trade unions, the state, etc.).
Besides performing, teaching folk music and dance was part of Halmos’s activities from the very beginning. Even at the rehearsals of the Bartók Ensemble, they not only played and danced, but also taught interested musicians – something for which no other forum existed at the time. In 1973, at the request of Halmos and Sebő, the Institute of Folk Culture organised its first folk-music course. In 1976, after Ferenc Sebő joined the Institute, they organised the first national camp for dance-house musicians and dancers in Abaújszántó, where Halmos taught violin. The camp developed into a two-year training programme, lasting until 1978 and concluding with an examination.
Halmos and Sebő also appeared regularly on television: from 1976 in the programme Aprók tánca (Dance of the Little Ones), and they also sang and played in Halhatatlanul (Immortally), a series edited by László Nagy.
By the late 1970s, research and collecting had become increasingly important to him, and in 1979 he left the Sebő Ensemble. In 1980, at the invitation of Zoltán Kátai, he began teaching violin in Győr under the auspices of the National Council of Amateur Folk Dancers, and continued teaching until 1982 all around the country (in Jászberény, Szeged, Debrecen and Bonyhád). Besides the teaching itself, the curriculum for the weekend courses was compiled by Halmos together with Ferenc Sebő and Márta Virágvölgyi. Most of the later táncház lead fiddlers were his students. In 1982, he also taught in Toronto, Canada. The courses continued until 1986.
The 1980s in Halmos’s life were dominated by scholarship and research. In 1982 he obtained a research fellowship at the Department of Instrumental Folk Music of the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. At the encouragement of the folklorist Lajos Vargyas, he wrote his study Tizenkét széki csárdás (Twelve Szék Csárdás), which later formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation. In this work he already applied the analysis of musical processes, making it possible to identify with confidence the instrumental melody as it appears in its various formal, rhythmic and harmonic variants. With the “simplified score notation” he devised, he was able to record separately the playing of each instrument, the folk shouts and interjections (called csujjogatás), and the singing. He also created a number–letter combination for notating the accompaniment, which made the notation significantly shorter and more transparent.
Under the influence of Lajos Vargyas and György Martin he began to write his doctoral thesis, with Bálint Sárosi – who regarded the dance-house movement with some reservation – as his supervisor. His official opponents were István Halmos and Iván Vitányi. In 1987 he earned the title Candidate of Musicology with his thesis about István Ádám “Icsán” and His Band – A Monograph of a Musical Ensemble from Szék.
In the 1990s he attempted to organise higher-level training in folk music. He founded and headed the Department of Folk Music at the Miskolc Humanities Association. As the Association did not obtain national accreditation, the programme was transferred to the College of Nyíregyháza, where Árpád Jób, former leader of the Délibáb Ensemble, took over his position. From then on, he travelled there from Budapest only to conduct examinations. For years he worked with several colleagues (Márta Virágvölgyi, András Jánosi, Pál Richter, Gábor Eredics and others) to launch the university-level folk-music programme at the Liszt Academy in 2007. This was the first programme in Hungary to train folk-music performers and teachers at university level – a role it continues to fulfil today. Within the department he taught chamber music and ensemble practice.
Since 1991 he had been the music director of the television series Népzenei Magazin (Folk Music Magazine), co-edited with György Szomjas and Katalin Rosta, and from 1994 of Duna Television’s Táncház – Népzenei Magazin. The programmes ran on national public television channel MTV until 2003 and on Duna TV broadcasting to Hungarian communities abroad until 2004, when they were stopped for financial reasons. The monthly 25–30-minute episodes presented the traditional folk music and dances of the Carpathian Basin – including the cultures of ethnic minorities – and occasionally offered insights into other genres with folk-music roots. In the 1990s he and Szomjas worked together on another major project: they sought to portray, as comprehensively as possible, the village musicians, singers and bands who had exerted the strongest influence on the dance-house movement. By 2001 they had produced nine documentary films under the title Új régi hang – Tisztelet a mestereknek (New Old Sound – Homage to the Masters), released first on VHS and later expanded into a 12-part DVD series in 2013. The films profiled such key figures as fiddlers János Zerkula from Gyimesközéplok, Márton Maneszes from Magyarszováti, Sándor Fodor 'Neti' from Kisbácsi or Ferenc Szántó from Magyarbece; the Csángó singers András Gergely from Türe and Anna Jánó of Leszped; the piper István Pál from Tereske or the members of the celebrated Szászcsávás band. He also planned a portrait-film series about the dance-house movement itself but could not realise it before his death.
His ideal was always the singing prímás, and he himself sang while playing. Béla Halmos released nearly twenty albums either solo or with his own ensemble, and contributed to many more (including recordings with Levente Szörényi and Márta Sebestyén). His violin playing can be heard, among others, on albums like: Sebő Ensemble (1975); Táncház I (1978); Táncház II (1978); Táncházi muzsika (Music for Dance-Houses, 1978); Ferenc Sebő’s LPs: Énekelt versek (Sung Poems, 1980); Az a szép piros hajnal (Hungarian Folk Music From Transylvania, 1989); Kalamajka & Egyszólam ensemble’s: Megütik a dobot (Folk Music from the 1848 Revolution, 1998); Kalamajka ensemble’s LPs: Ez is borivóknak való! (1999); Haj, Rákóczi, haj, Bercsényi! (2002); Széki pár (2003); Aprók táncházában II (2003). From 1975 to 2000 he also worked continuously as a record editor and music director for numerous releases. Over his four-decade career he played with countless musicians and ensembles. He was a member of the Halmos–Sebő Duo, the Sebő Ensemble, the Kalamajka Ensemble and the PG Group.
Besides his doctoral thesis, he published two books – A széki férfitáncok zenéje (The Music of Men’s Dances in Szék with Márta Virágvölgyi) and ”Meg kell a búzának érni” – A magyar táncházmozgalom 40 éve (”The wheat must ripen” – 40 Years of the Hungarian Dance-House Movement with Emese Halák and Mihály Hoppál) – as well as nearly twenty scholarly studies.
With the support of OTKA national research grants, he led projects between 1994 and 2002 that produced transcriptions for several forthcoming monographs on village fiddlers. Together with Márta Virágvölgyi, András Vavrinecz and Balázs Vizeli, he prepared detailed transcriptions of nearly 2,000 melodies from the following musicians: Sándor “Neti” Fodor (Kisbács), János Cilika (Bogártelke), János “Zsidó” Gondos (Gernyeszeg), Aladár Csiszár (Magyarpéterlaka), Imre Kanalas (Sarmaság), József Kozák (Ádámos), András Horváth Sr. (Tiszakóród), János Orsós Kis (Bogyiszló), Márton Maneszes (Magyarszovát), Tibor Dancs (Kovácsvágás), Árpád Oláh (Bodrogmező), Alajos Balogh (Rimaszécs), Géza Potta (Abaújszina), Rudolf Farkas (Kürt) and Grigore Balaş (Csabaújfalu).
He was also active in several professional organisations. As the first president of the Chamber of Dance-Houses, he oversaw the professional organisation of the dance-house meetings. As a member of the professional certification committee, he participated in the accreditation of primary-level arts schools. As president of the Friends’ Circle of the Hungarian Heritage House, he organised exhibitions and conferences from 2007 onwards. As a member of the Cultural Subcommittee of the Hungarian National Commission for UNESCO, his work contributed significantly to the inclusion of the táncház method — in November 2011 — on UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, specifically in the Register of Best Safeguarding Practices.
In 1997, on the 25th anniversary of the táncház movement, he conceived the idea of the Táncház Archive, with the aim of preserving the legacy of its first quarter century. Over the years, the archive accumulated an immense quantity of photographs and written documents, complemented by several hundred hours of interviews that Halmos recorded with older and younger members of the movement – the collection he called the “oral archive”. One of the archive’s most valuable components is a collection of more than 6,500 photographs documenting the movement’s wide range of events in Hungary and abroad. Until his retirement, he served as director of the Táncház Archive. He not only collected written sources, posters, photographs, audio recordings and memoirs, but also digitised them. After his death, in 2014, the Hungarian Heritage House acquired from his heirs his folklore collections, manuscripts, part of his library, thousands of photographs taken during his fieldwork and documenting the revival movement, stage folklore and táncház events, as well as his master violin.
With his tragic death, Hungarian folk-culture preservation lost one of its most active, versatile and integrative figures. He played a major role in ensuring that the táncház movement — in the spirit of Bartók and Kodály — drew upon authentic folk traditions. As one of the initiators and leading organisers of dance-houses, one of his greatest achievements was that the táncház movement preserved, revived and popularised folk music amongst a community of urban youth, while it was already dying in the villages. Throughout his life, Halmos worked tirelessly to ensure that traditional instrumental folk music would be taught in an organised form from primary school to university level.
[2016]
References
Abkarovits, Endre: Meg kell a búzának érni... Halmos Béla népzenésszel beszélget Abkarovits Endre. Kairosz Kiadó, Budapest, 2012. (”Magyarnak lenni” series)
Folkmagazin 2014 (10) Halmos Béla Emlékezete (Special issue) http://folkmagazin.hu/flipbook/index.php?file=mag14_x
Kiss, Eszter Veronika: Meghalt az első táncházas prímás, Halmos Béla. Magyar Nemzet 2013.07.19. http://mno.hu/grund/meghalt-az-elso-tanchazas-primas-1173638
Bardocz, Sándor: In memoriam Halmos Béla. Erdélyi Napló 2013.07.26.
https://kronika.ro/erdelyi-naplo/kulturter/in-memoriam-halmos-bela
Interview with Béla Halmos:
https://hagyomanyokhaza.hu/hu/node/1406/
Huszti Zoltán: Mi minden múlik azon, hová születtél? 2010.08.29.
https://hagyomanyokhaza.hu/hu/node/1406/
Halmos Béla: A Táncház Archívum
https://hagyomanyokhaza.hu/hu/tanchaz-archivum/