Zoltán Juhász, born on 9 March 1955, decided in a single moment what his vocation would be after hearing a recording of a furulya [traditional duct flute] player from Ghimeș (Gyimes). By profession he is an electrical engineer, working in the field of learning algorithms and artificial intelligence. He completed his university studies in 1978 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Budapest University of Technology. He obtained a university doctoral degree in 1982 as a scholarship holder at the KFKI (Central Research Institute for Physics) and earned his PhD in 1998. He is active across four main areas.
Scientific researcher
His early research focused on the adaptive control of single-crystal growth, later on the adaptive filtering of noise from folk music phonograph recordings. He is currently engaged in the computer-based study of folk music as a senior research fellow at the Institute for Technical Physics and Materials Science of the Research Centre for Natural Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, with support from the OTKA fund. He could be world-famous for the computer-based analytical method he developed, through which folk melodies from all corners of the world, once thought to be distant, can meet.
He is a passionate researcher, performer and teacher of the instrumental and vocal musical traditions of Hungarian shepherd culture. In 1976 he met his first real-life masters, duct flute players György Csobán and Pál Gusa from Western Moldavia, who had resettled in Hungary. Since then he has amassed some five hundred hours of recordings.
His book on the artificial intelligences developed to investigate the Eurasian connections of Hungarian folk music and on their results was published in 2006 under the title A zene ősnyelve (lit. The Ancient Language of Music). The algorithms developed for the purposes of music research were also successfully applied to the investigation of certain linguistic questions. The results were presented in a book written jointly with Gábor Czakó, Beljebb a magyar észjárásba (lit. Deeper into the Hungarian Way of Thinking), published in 2010. He also took part in the work that made the so-called old Hungarian folk song types available online. Within the framework of a successful Széchenyi Plan grant, he worked in 2002–2003 on the time-series analysis of pressure waves recorded during blood pressure measurement and on the classification of wave types. More recently, he has also been involved in a research group examining the relationship between human population genetics and folk music cultures.
Folk music collector
He has been engaged with folk music and with the traditional duct flute and bagpipe playing in the Carpathian Basin for thirty-five years. He has been collecting, studying and disseminating the musical traditions, melodies and playing techniques of traditional shepherd musicians living in different regions of the Hungarian-speaking areas. The approximately five hundred hours of material accumulated to date were gathered primarily in Transylvania, Palócland, Southern Transdanubia and the Tiszántúl region. He also took part in the Utolsó Óra (Last Hour) programme organised by the Fonó Buda Music House, during which the repertoires of Transylvanian and Transdanubian shepherd musicians were recorded and published. He has published several studies on this subject and several recorder method books, and he has written a musical monograph on two bagpipe and duct flute-playing shepherds from Nógrád, and an analytical study on a Ghimeș duct flute player. He also authored a comprehensive study on the types of duct flute used in Hungarian folk music. For this body of work he was awarded the Martin György Foundation Prize on two occasions.
Performing artist
As an active folk musician and performing artist, he makes music not only as a soloist but also as a member of the Egyszólam Együttes, active since 1986, and he frequently collaborates in the programmes and recordings of renowned folk music ensembles, playing various types of duct flutes as well as bagpipes. Before the ensemble was founded, it seemed almost unimaginable that an entire evening, a full concert or a complete album could be performed solely on shepherd instruments. By now this has become natural, and following Zoltán Juhász’s footsteps, a multitude of musical groups and musicians have emerged.
Together with his fellow musicians he performs in concerts and dance-house events both in Hungary and abroad. Recently, most of his performances have been with the Juhász Family Band, founded together with his children. The field of Hungarian folk music that particularly interests them is monophonic vocal and instrumental music performed on duct flute and bagpipes, where instead of counterpoint and harmony the musician condenses everything they wish to communicate into the improvised shaping of the melody. Monophony, in this sense, therefore means more than the mere absence of counterpoint. It is a musical approach whose rules simultaneously support the freedom of performance, the free ornamentation and variation of melodies, and their concision. This harmony of rules and freedom is what they present in today’s disharmonious world. (This can be studied in greater detail on the basis of the representative audio material that has been published.)
His duct flute playing has been admired by audiences at, among other venues, the Royal Festival Hall in London, the Lincoln Center in New York and the concert hall of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Most recently, in 2013, he took part in the Hungarian Heritage Festival held in Washington together with his Ghimeș masters and with the small ensemble formed by his children, the Juhász Family Band.
During their collecting trips they gained lifelong musical and human experiences from those village musicians and singers who still know this tradition well today. Since their formation they have performed continuously in university and youth clubs, community centres, camps, festivals and dance-house gatherings.
Music teacher
Besides his scientific research, Zoltán Juhász teaches music at the Department of Folk Music of the Liszt Academy, as well as at the Óbuda Folk Music School. Even before the establishment of the department, he taught in music schools and at folk music camps. At the camp of the Egyszólam Együttes, students can take part in a kind of masterclass: while becoming acquainted with the repertoire associated with shepherd instruments, they can also learn professional skills directly from older shepherd musicians, Hungarian duct flute and bagpipe players from Transylvania and Western Moldavia.
[2014]