András Jánosi was born in Budapest on 3 June 1951. His father was Sándor Jánosi, or, as he was widely known, ‘Mr. Juló’, one of the most prominent, nationally recognised figures of the Hungarian scouting movement before 1948. In the 1930s, he served as leader of the Regös Scout movement, where, in the spirit of Sándor Karácsony and Zoltán Kodály, he renewed the cultural and folk-artistic dimensions of the movement. In 1945, he became head of the Hungarian Cserkészszövetség (Scout Association). Alongside Muharay, he acted as a patron of the NÉKOSZ (National Association of Hall of Residences for Folk Studies) movements, yet he never aligned himself with the Communist Party. From 1948 he worked as an assistant restorer. Later he also supported the Pioneer movement with his advice and helped introduce children with disabilities to folk culture. András Jánosi learned and inherited a deep love of folk traditions from him. His mother, Kornélia Vincze, was a Hungarian, English and German language and literature teacher.
He completed his secondary education in 1969 at Toldi Ferenc Secondary Grammar School in Budapest. At that time, the school was home to the legendary Bartók Dance Ensemble led by Sándor Timár.
From 1972, from its very beginnings, Jánosi joined the dance house movement, and soon thereafter became a member of the Bartók Ensemble, initially as a dancer and later as a musician.
In 1974, he became involved in the work of collecting, transcribing and researching instrumental folk music organised by György Martin, head of the Dance Department of the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, together with a group of young collaborators. In the course of this work, Jánosi collected and transcribed several hundred instrumental dance melodies on behalf of the Institute.
From 1974, he studied in Transylvania, in the Mezőség (Câmpia Transilvaniei) region, with Károly Dobos, one of the legendary ‘prímás’ [musical leader of a traditional folk ensemble] of the town of Szék (Sic). It was here that he began to study the music of Szék. Under Dobos’s influence, he became deeply engaged with the archaic village fiddle style, observing, analysing and collecting data.
In 1975, he founded his own ensemble, the Jánosi Ensemble. Barely a year later, in 1976, the ensemble was awarded the title Young Master of Folk Art, founded by the Ministry of Culture, a distinction that strongly supported its subsequent work.
The ensemble ranks among the founders of the Hungarian dance house movement. For eighteen years it held regular dance houses, and from 1980, it had a permanent base at the MOM Cultural Centre in Budapest’s 12th district. From the mid-1980s, this became one of the most frequently attended dance houses in the capital. Through its thematic concerts the ensemble created a new genre. Each of its thirty-one thematic concert programmes, covering twenty-eight different musical themes, presents an important field or period of Hungarian musical tradition, or its influence on art music, in an accessible manner (Hungarian musical sources of works by Bartók, Liszt, Haydn and Kodály; eighteenth-century Hungarian instrumental collections and their relationship to instrumental folk music; surviving traces of eighteenth-century dance music and the living folk dance tradition; the music of the Rákóczi War of Independence and of the 1848–49 Revolution and War of Independence, etc.).
The ensemble’s first major breakthrough came with a theatrical programme that presented to audiences the folk-music sources of several of Bartók’s compositions. The programme, preceded by several years of research, was received with enthusiasm by both audiences and critics alike. This is evidenced by the fact that since its premiere in 1981 it has been staged in countless versions both in Hungary and abroad. Its title was Zene húros hangszerekre… dudára és furulyára (Music for Strings… Bagpipes and Flutes), and its first venue was the legendary Budapest University Stage. The production was preceded by four years of independent research by András Jánosi. With this programme the ensemble created a new ‘genre’ and a new stage form in Hungary, combining art music, folk music, prose, dance and diaporama. In the following years, two further similar premieres followed (Hallottad-e hírét Szatmár Vármegyének? (Have You Heard the News of Szatmár [Satu Mare] County?); Holttenger (Dead Sea)). These were later followed by approximately thirty further thematic concert programmes of a similar nature.
From the mid-1980s onwards, the most important field of the ensemble’s activity became the presentation of the historical past of Hungarian instrumental musical tradition. The string dance music of Hungarian villages represents the legacy of the rich instrumental musical traditions of earlier centuries. This earlier hypothesis was also confirmed by András Jánosi’s comparative musical research encompassing several hundred melodies. Through this work, previously unknown folk-music connections of the Liszt Rhapsodies (and other contemporary works) were revealed, as well as written sources of Hungarian instrumental folk music dating back several centuries. It also became evident that Hungarian village musicians preserved not only old melodies but also centuries-old string performance practices. The ensemble’s programmes related to this theme are based on the latest results of musicological research, while at the same time appealing to a broad audience through their popular and accessible style.
Through its work to date, the ensemble has earned recognition from both critics and audiences alike, as attested not only by laudatory reviews but also by prestigious invitations and guest performances.
A few selected excerpts from published reviews include: “András Jánosi has devised perhaps the most original tribute of the Bartók centenary…” (László Somfai); “Listening to the first recording of the Jánosi Ensemble is obligatory for Bartók enthusiasts but may also prove valuable for all lovers of music.” (Gonzalo Badanes, Spain); the ensemble’s first recording is “a beautifully presented and produced important publication. It sheds new light on Hungarian folk-music performance style and, together with this, on the works of Bartók and other contemporary composers.” (Brian Isarel, USA); “Those present at the Jánosi Ensemble’s Liszt concert on 21 December heard one of the most exciting and thought-provoking undertakings of the Liszt Year…” (Tamás Váczi).
From 1978 to 1981, Jánosi and his ensemble were employed by the State Budapest Dance Ensemble as the accompanying orchestra of the dance company.
In 1981 András Jánosi began his career as a violin teacher at the folk music department of the State Music School of Budapest’s 3rd district, which from 1990 has operated as an independent institution under the name Óbuda Folk Music School, where he has continued to teach ever since. This school is the only music school in Hungary devoted exclusively to the teaching of folk music. Alongside teaching, he continued his work in collecting, researching and transcribing folk music, and remained active with his ensemble.
From 1985 he began to study the material of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hungarian manuscript dance-music collections and to compare them with the still-living instrumental folk-music tradition of our time. Over the past more than three decades, this work has become decisive in the career of András Jánosi and his ensemble. He primarily applied the results of his research as a performer in the ensemble’s work – the results can also be heard on the ensemble’s four CDs – but also incorporated them into his teaching.
In 1993, he was admitted to the György Bessenyei Teacher Training College in Nyíregyháza (today Nyíregyháza Teacher Training College), where in 1996 he graduated as a teacher of music (singing), folk music. In 1993 this institution launched Hungary’s first programme in folk-music teacher training. At the invitation of the college, he also worked for two years as a violin teacher in the department.
From 1998, he participated in the development of the Fundamental Arts Education Curricula as the author of the violin curriculum for folk-music education, work that in effect represented the continuation of a curriculum-writing programme he had begun earlier, in 1981, at the 3rd District Music School (later the Óbuda Folk Music School).
In 2002, in recognition of his work in music education to date, the President of the Republic of Hungary awarded him the Hungarian Gold Cross of Merit.
In 2003, he was admitted to the traditional arts programme of Høgskolen i Telemark in Norway, where in 2006 he obtained an MA qualification as a folk musician. (At that time, it was not yet possible to obtain a university degree as a folk musician in Hungary.)
In 2006, he developed the violin-teaching curriculum for the folk-music programme launched at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music. As head of the string department, he participated in the work of the newly established Folk Music Department at the Academy, which began operating in September 2007.
In 2015, he defended his DLA dissertation at the Doctoral School of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music under the title Az archaikus magyar hegedűjáték (lit. Archaic Hungarian Violin Playing). An excerpt from the introduction to the dissertation reads as follows:
Music is a kind of audible system of gestures capable of expressing feelings and thoughts that cannot be articulated in other ways. It is a language-like system, analogous to language, whose expressive power depends greatly on the living nature of the language – the musical language – just as in the case of spoken language. Although many people still know Latin today, there is no contemporary Latin literature or Latin poetry. Literary language is a more refined, expressive and specialised form of everyday language, yet it cannot exist without a living vernacular and linguistic public life. Similarly, art music (musical literary language) requires a musical vernacular in order to articulate those everyday – or even festive – thoughts and messages of individuals and human communities that cannot be expressed otherwise. Such a musical vernacular known and used by society (the people) has not existed in Europe for centuries, but in Hungary it still did at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries (fragmentarily, traces of it can still be found today). It was preserved by the people, primarily in popular usage, but was also regarded and used as a shared cultural treasure by the nobility.
In 2015, he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts. The title of his inaugural lecture was A magyar hangszeres népzenei hagyomány 18. századi öröksége (The Eighteenth-Century Legacy of Hungarian Instrumental Folk-Music Tradition). In this paper Jánosi expounds the characteristics and significance of Hungarian musical tradition, as well as the place and role of violin music within world violin culture.
The reason why the violin has for centuries been among the most beloved instruments of our people, and why our violin tradition may have exerted such a strong influence on Europe’s musical life, is not that the Italian instrument known as the ‘violino’ reached us via German mediation during the eighteenth century, that we learned to play it and were more talented in this respect than other European peoples. Rather, it lies in the fact that in Hungary there existed for several centuries a tradition – in one or more forms – of an instrument somewhat different from the modern violin, yet similar in its manner of playing, on which the melodies of our millennia-old musical tradition were performed. Whether we consider the triumphant rise of the Hungarian violin school beginning in the nineteenth century, or the several-hundred-year-old flourishing violin tradition among the people that underpinned it, it is justified to speak of Hungarian violin playing as a distinctive characteristic – if one wishes, as a hungarikum.
He is the author of numerous professional writings, primarily researching the nature and characteristics of folk violin playing, including Dobos Károly vonókezelési technikája (Károly Dobos’s Bowing Technique), A barokk zene előadásának élő hagyománya Magyarországon (The Living Tradition of Baroque Music Performance in Hungary), Az erdélyi falusi hangszeres zene 18. századi gyökerei (The Eighteenth-Century Roots of Transylvanian Village Instrumental Music), A magyar hangszeres népzenei hagyomány 18. századi öröksége (The Eighteenth-Century Legacy of Hungarian Instrumental Folk-Music Tradition), A magyar népzene előadásmódja (The Performance Practice of Hungarian Folk Music), and Az archaikus magyar hegedűjáték (Archaic Hungarian Violin Playing).
Numerous sound recordings preserve his playing with the ensemble, including Népzene Bartók műveiben (Folk Music in Bartók’s Works), Szatmári és mezőségi zene (Music from Szatmár [Satu Mare] and Mezőség [Câmpia Transilvaniei]), Rapszódia (Rhapsody), Liszt források (Liszt Sources), Vajdakamarási, kalocsai és széki muzsika (Music from Vajdakamarás [Vaida-Cămăraș], Kalocsa and Szék [Sic]), Ezernyolcszáznegyvennyolcba’… Válogatás a szabadságharc korának zenéjéből (In Eighteen Forty-Eight… A Selection from the Music of the War of Independence), 77 magyar tánc (77 Hungarian Dances), Kossuth izenete eljött… Az 1848/49-es szabadságharc korának dallamai a korabeli források, valamint a népi emlékezet szerint (Kossuth’s Message Has Arrived… The Melodies of the 1848/49 War of Independence According to Contemporary Sources and Folk Memory), Pro patria. Válogatás a Rákóczi szabadságharc korának zenei emlékeiből (Pro Patria. A Selection from the Musical Legacy of the Rákóczi War of Independence), Galántától Gyergyóremetéig. Kodály források (From Galánta to Gyergyóremete. Kodály Sources), and Felső-Maros vidéki hegedűmuzsika. Válogatás Bartók Béla 1912–14-es Felső-Maros vidéki gyűjtéseiből (Violin Music from the Upper Maros Region. A Selection from Béla Bartók’s 1912–14 Upper Maros Collections).
András Jánosi is not only a defining figure among performers of string-based folk music but also ranks among the most widely accepted and respected teachers of folk music.
[2016]