István Pávai, ethnomusicologist and university professor, recipient of the Széchenyi, Szabolcsi, and Martin Prizes, was born on 10 December 1951 in Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc). He completed his primary and secondary education in Székelykeresztúr (Cristuru Secuiesc), his father’s hometown. His first experiences with folklore were acquired during these years at the Korond (Corund) home of his grandparents, in the Sóvidék region (Ținutul Sării), which is rich in folk music and dance traditions. He began his higher musical studies in 1970 at the Faculty of Music Education of the University of Brașov, and from 1971 continued at the Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) Music Academy. It was here that his scholarly interest in folk music developed, under the guidance of his teachers János Jagamas and Ilona Szenik. In 1976, he earned his degree in musicology, later recognized by the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest in 1995. He subsequently obtained his PhD (2005) and his habilitation (2017) at the same institution.
Fieldwork
István Pávai began his fieldwork in folk music during his university years, conducting detailed repertory surveys with his fellow students under the guidance of Ilona Szenik. These monographic surveys were carried out in Nagymedvés (Medveș) (1973), Kalotaszentkirály (Sâncraiu) (1974), and subsequently in the Sóvidék region (Ținutul Sării) (1975). Following his university studies, encouraged by the folk-dance researcher György Martin, he began to specialise in the study of traditional dance music. From 1976, as a staff member of the County House of Folk Arts in Csíkszereda (Miercurea-Ciuc), he primarily collected folk music in Székely Land, but extending beyond his official remit, he also gathered material in Moldavia, the Mezőség region (Câmpia Transilvaniei), and the area of the Maros (Mureș) and Küküllő (Târnava) rivers. During this period, also under Martin György’s influence, he began collecting folk dances and documenting them on film.
In 1981, he moved to Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș), expanding his collection area to the more westerly regions of Transylvania, reaching as far as Szilágyság (Sălaj). During this period, his primary focus was on documenting music from regions and genres that had previously been little studied or recorded. Some of the valuable material he collected was published in Romania in the 1980s on four vinyl records.
In addition to dance collection, he documented instrumental performance practices through films of village musicians. To capture the music of rural ensembles, he used near-studio-quality stereo tape recorders, and after 1990, he began simultaneous recordings with digital audio recorders and video cameras. In 1991, he conducted fieldwork among Dobrujan Turks, Tatars, and Lipovans, and during his travels to Turkey, he recorded performances by Crimean Tatar, Kosovar Turkish, and Azerbaijani musicians.
Through intensive work, he amassed several hundred hours of material within just a few years. As opportunities to conduct his research within a scholarly institute did not arise in Transylvania even after the political transition [1989] and having received an invitation from the Ethnographic Museum to take up a museological position, he relocated to Budapest. At the same time, he was also employed as a research fellow at the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His collecting area continued to focus on the eastern regions of the Hungarian-speaking territory, from Moldavia to the Partium region.
At the initiative of László Kelemen, between 1997 and 1999, a unique collection opportunity arose at the Fonó Budai Music House, in which István Pávai played a key role. Under the project entitled Utolsó Óra (lit. The Last Hour), over a few years, some fifty rural Transylvanian ensembles were brought into the studio, where recordings were made over five days with each ensemble, including detailed repertory surveys and interviews exploring the social functions of the music. The collection also extended to other ethnic groups in Transylvania and, later, to the entire Carpathian Basin. The consolidated material from Utolsó Óra, edited by Pávai, was published as an online database in 2024: utolsoora.hu/.
In the 2000s, Pávai started a new method of collecting, typical of visual anthropology. This time, he started digitising archival photos of traditional music and dance in the field, at the houses of the villagers, and then replaying them on a laptop, while video interviewing the locals about the musicians, dancers and folk scenes in the photos. This oral history method was particularly important in areas where no previous data on local folklore existed, i.e. in the villages of the Hungarian diaspora in Transylvania that had been neglected for research purposes.
In addition to his intensive collection of folk-dance music, he also documented traditional vocal folk music and genres on the borderline of folklore (religious folk songs, urban gypsy music). Together with Pál Richter, he also studied in the field the traditional organ-playing of rural peasant cantors who were unfamiliar with musical notation.
After the establishment of the Folk Music Department at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music (2007), Pávai made several demonstration collections with students on the department's collecting tours, where young people were introduced to the methodology of folk music and folk dance collecting.
Institutional folk music research
As a result of two decades of fieldwork conducted without institutional support, in 1993 he published the volume Az erdélyi és a moldvai magyarság népi tánczenéje (lit. Folk-Dance Music of the Hungarians in Transylvania and Moldavia), supplemented with transcribed musical examples. The professional success of this work also contributed to his appointments at the Museum of Ethnography and the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA), where he continued to work until his retirement in 2021.
His research primarily focused on the study of folk-dance music within institutional frameworks, a topic that had previously been insufficiently explored. Sporadic publications on this subject appeared relatively late, often as by-products of dance research, and at times studies of instrumental folk music further enriched his findings. These were collected, edited, and published together with Márta Virágvölgyi in A magyar népi tánczene (lit. Hungarian Folk Dance Music) (2000). However, his approach was distinguished by a comprehensive perspective that did not examine the subject solely from the viewpoint of dance, nor solely from that of instruments and instrumental ensembles, but rather explored the functional, substantive, and formal aspects of folk-dance music in their interrelation. Significant results in this regard were presented in Az erdélyi magyar népi tánczene (lit. Folk Dance Music of the Hungarians in Transylvania) (2012) and Hungarian Folk Dance Music of Transylvania (2021). These publications elicited considerable response among both scholarly researchers and practitioners in the folk music revival movement, both within Hungarian-speaking regions and in international academic circles.
For him, conducting research in an interethnic context is natural, as in Transylvania the participation of different ethnic groups in each other’s dance events and weddings, along with the shared use of professional musicians, created a greater degree of interaction than is typically observed in other musical genres. His advanced knowledge of the Romanian language, including its vernacular, proved invaluable for this research, as did his studies at the Cluj Conservatory in Romanian folk music and its investigation, particularly under Traian Mârza (music folklore) and Romeo Ghircoiaşiu (ethnomusicology). Consequently, it is unsurprising that he has published several studies on this topic, including works in foreign languages (Interethnische Beziehungen in der volkstümlichen Tanzmusik Siebenbürgens, 1998), and devoted dedicated chapters to it in his books.
István Pávai considered it important to apply a dialectological perspective in the study of folk dance music. He was also motivated by the fact that previous research on the regional differentiation of folklore had been inconsistent. He addressed these contradictions in a dedicated study (Az erdélyi nagytáj a néprajz-, népzene- és néptánckutatás szemléletében, [lit. The Major Regions of Transylvania in the Perspective of Ethnography, Folk Music, and Folk Dance Research] 2005). His fieldwork revealed that the same dance repertoire and the restricted operational areas of the musicians serving dance events define microregions within which folk dance music is relatively uniform. At the same time, these microregions possess distinctive attributes that differentiate them from neighbouring areas, alongside shared elements that vary only in nuance. He summarized these findings in A népi tánczene kistáji tagolódása Erdélyben (lit. The Micro-Regional Division of Folk Dance Music in Transylvania) (2012) and, regarding his native region, in a more extensive study including a corpus of 500 audio examples (Székelyföld népi tánczene szempontú táji tagolódása, [The Regional Division of Folk Dance Music in Székely Land] 2018). He also published bilingual Hungarian–English editions documenting all available source material: A Magyarózd népzenéje Horváth István gyűjtései tükrében (The Folk Music of Magyarózd, as Reflected in the Collections of István Horváth) (2015) and A Sóvidék népzenéje (The Folk Music of Sóvidék) (2016). In addition, in the 2000s he edited audio source publications in CD format from his own earlier field collections and from the Utolsó Óra project.
In line with his dialectological research, Pávai created numerous maps illustrating the regional differentiation of folk music. These were published in his own and others’ works and some are also accessible online: pavai.hu/publikaciok/terkepek/.
Interethnic and dialectological research has many lessons that lead to the field of cultural identity studies. Such research has been carried out by Pávai mainly among the Moldavian Hungarians, examining the meaning of ethnonyms and exonyms for this ethnic group, conflicts of religious and ethnic consciousness, musical aspects of identity, etc. His studies on the subject are summarised in the volume entitled Zene, vallás, identitás a moldvai magyar népéletben (lit. Music, Religion, Identity in Moldavian Hungarian Folk Life) (2005). His publications on the subject have attracted the interest not only of ethnomusicologists but also of ethnographers, cultural anthropologists and linguists, as is also indicated by the high number of references to them. He has also extended the scope of identity studies to include Gypsy musicians who play for other ethnic groups.
Another important area of István Pávai’s work is the history of research, which is not limited to folk dance music but encompasses the entire field of ethnomusicological study. In his first major study in this area (2000), he examined the formation and development of the Folk Music Collection of the Museum of Ethnography. Subsequently, he produced a series of studies on the folkloristic work of Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály (2008), László Lajtha (2009), and Béla Vikár (2011). In collaboration with Krisztina Pálóczy, he published a detailed study of Péter Balla’s contributions to folk music research (2014).
He summarized the work of his former teachers, the foremost figures of Transylvanian ethnomusicology, János Jagamas and Ilona Szenik, in two publications (2014 and 2019), simultaneously making accessible in Hungary for the first time the full folk music collections held in the Cluj Archive of the Romanian Academy. (The co-editors representing the Cluj archive were Erzsébet Zakariás and Zoltán Gergely.) In several of his writings, Pávai also addressed the research of Zoltán Kallós. At present, he is preparing the publication of István Almási’s folk music collection; Almási, like Kallós and Szenik, was a late member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.
Of comparable research-historical significance, in 2010 he co-edited with Tekla Tötszegi a previously unpublished collection of glass-plate negatives from the Transylvanian Ethnographic Museum. These photographs, taken by the English photographer Denis Galloway between the two World Wars, depict folk-life scenes of Hungarian, Romanian, Saxon, and Hutsul communities, including music, dance, and customs. This publication, like the Jagamas and Szenik collections, appeared as a trilingual edition (Hungarian, Romanian, English).
Pávai also considered it important to highlight the work of Transylvanian folk music collectors and researchers who were never afforded positions in research institutions, such as Csaba Szabó, István Horváth, Aladár Zoltán, and Piroska Demény. A major outcome of his work in the history of research is the bibliographical compilation A romániai magyar vonatkozású zenetudomány bibliográfiája (lit, Bibliography of Hungarian-Related Musicology in Romania) (2019), co-edited with Emese Sófalvi. He has also made use of his research-historical results in the form of exhibitions (see: pavai.hu/kiallitasok/).
Another central focus of István Pávai’s scholarly interests is the systematization of melodies. The Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA Zenetudományi Intézet) provided him with an excellent opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding of the organizational results achieved by previous generations of researchers, particularly those working with the corpus of vocal folk music. Together with Pál Richter, he edited and published online the Bartók Collection Multimedia Database (systems.zti.hu/br/) as well as a curated selection of the Dobszay–Szendrei Type Catalogue (nepzeneipeldatar.hu/). At the Hagyományok Háza (Hungarian Heritage House), in 2001 Pávai specified the Folklore Database of complex structure, which from 2023 onwards has included work on the development of a systematized repertoire of instrumental folk music melodies.
Academic work
In 1994, alongside his research work at the Institute for Musicology and the Museum of Ethnography, Pávai did not initially plan to engage in teaching. However, already in the following year he was invited by the Department of Ethnography at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) to conduct a one-semester specialised course in folk music. In the 1998–99 academic year, he delivered a two-semester seminar on Hungarian folk music at the Department of Ethnography of the University of Pécs. Between 1998 and 2002, he also served as a visiting lecturer at the Department of Musicology at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music (Zeneakadémia), where he taught courses on folk music and seminars in ethnomusicology.
István Pávai was a founding member of the Department of Folk Music at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, where, from the department’s establishment in 2007 until his retirement as a university professor in 2021, he taught a wide range of courses, including folk music transcription, collection and archiving of folk music, folk music theory, folk music analysis, and Hungarian folk music. Concurrently, with the establishment of the ethnomusicology programme at the Department of Musicology, he taught the core subject of ethnomusicology, thereby contributing to the long-awaited training of a new generation of folk music researchers. After retirement, he continued to teach folk music for two further semesters to students of choreography at the Sapientia University in Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár).
In parallel, from 1995 onwards, he delivered numerous guest lectures at other departments of the Academy of Music, at Eötvös Loránd University (departments of Music, Ethnography, Cultural Anthropology, and History), at the University of Nyíregyháza, and at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca.
His association with the Doctoral School of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music began in 2011, when he was invited to deliver a semester-long ethnomusicology course for doctoral students. In 2017, when folk music was accredited within the DLA (Doctor of Liberal Arts) programme, he was appointed head of the Folk Music subprogramme. At the same time, he became a member of the DLA Doctoral Council and the University Doctoral Council, positions he continues to hold even after retirement. He has acted as supervisor and examiner for numerous PhD and DLA dissertations, as well as for university theses.
Public Cultural and Musical Activities
At the outset of his work in Miercurea-Ciuc in 1976, István Pávai, together with József Simó, Imre Bokor, and Erzsébet Györfi, founded the Barozda folk music ensemble and established the first urban dance house in the Székely region. They subsequently assisted in launching other urban dance houses across Transylvania and played an active role in organising the dance house meetings in Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc) and Cluj-Napoca. Through numerous concerts, recordings, and radio and television broadcasts, they promoted authentic Transylvanian folk music. Among these, of particular significance was the Kaláka series on the Hungarian-language programme of the Romanian Television, which greatly stimulated interest among contemporary Transylvanian youth in folk music, folk dance, and active participation in dance houses.
In parallel, by expanding Barozda, Pávai founded the Kájoni Ensemble, whose objective was to integrate musical relics from earlier centuries of Transylvania into contemporary musical awareness, as well as to explore and present the connections between Transylvanian early music and the living folk tradition. He was one of the initiators of the Csíkszeredai Régizene Fesztivál (Early Music Festival of Miercurea-Ciuc) and served as its musical editor for the first three years, providing a forum and meeting point for the early music ensembles that were emerging across Transylvania at that time.
In 1981, István Pávai was invited to take the position of artistic secretary of the professional Maros Művészegyüttes (Maros Ensemble) in Târgu Mureș, where he participated in the creation of numerous stage productions until the political changes of 1989, incorporating the dance house approach into stage folk dance performances. He also emphasized the realization of high-level individual compositions derived from folk music and dance elements. Alongside his stage work, he contributed to the revival of the Târgu Mureș dance house, releasing recordings with its associated ensemble, Ördögszekér, and edited a radio series titled Táncházmuzsika (lit. Dance House Music) on the Târgu Mureș Radio until its closure in 1985.
After the political transition, between 1990 and 1994, he became editor and later head of the cultural programmes department at the revived Târgu Mureș Radio, producing numerous folk, musical, and public affairs programmes and series, including Gondolkodó magyarok (lit. Thinking Hungarians), Peremvilág (lit. Border World), Pásztortűz (lit. Shepherd’s Fire), Magyar táncok Európában (lit. Hungarian Dances in Europe), and Terpszikhoré kertje (lit. Garden of Terpsichore). In 1991, he organized a large-scale folklore performance on the stage of the Romanian Opera in Bucharest, showcasing the musical and dance traditions of 14 minority communities in Romania.
In parallel with his scholarly work in Hungary, Pávai frequently performed as a violist with the Üsztürü Ensemble and the Kalamajka Ensemble led by Béla Halmos in dance houses. During these years, he documented stage folk performances and dance houses across Transylvania and Hungary with photographs and film recordings.
On the 25th anniversary of the Barozda Ensemble, Pávai reunited in Miercurea-Ciuc with the founding members, who had emigrated to Sweden following the ban on Barozda and the Csíkszeredai Régizene Fesztivál (Early Music Festival of Miercurea-Ciuc) in 1986. Since then, the ensemble has regularly performed thematic folk and early music programmes in Transylvania and Hungary, issuing several recordings. Notable recent Barozda albums co-edited by Pávai and József Simó include Siculicidium (2014), commemorating the Madéfalva massacre [commemorating the mass murder committed against Székelys by the Habsburg army in 1764, under Maria Theresa at Madéfalva], and Kájoni és a népzene (lit. Kájoni and Folk Music) (2021).
Between 2013 and 2019, Pávai annually edited and hosted the gala performances of traditional music ensembles at the Csíkszeredai Prímástalálkozó [i.e. gathering of lead violinists]. A central goal of his public cultural work has been to integrate previously unknown musical treasures from archives into contemporary folk consciousness. To this end, he organized a series of successful concert programmes, including: Régi székely dallamvilág (lit. Old Székely Melodies) (Csíkszereda, 2014), Elfeledett Székelyföld (lit. Forgotten Székely Land) (Liszt Academy, 2015) A Szerettől a Szamosig (lit. From the River Szeret to the River Szamos) (Csíkszereda, 2015; Liszt Academy, 2016) “Halljátok, mit ajkim zengenek” (lit. ‘Can You Hear What I Sing’) (New Year’s programme, Művészetek Palotája) Programmes based on less-known collections of Zoltán Kallós (Székelyudvarhely, 2018; Cluj, 2019) Dédapáink székely népzenéje (lit. Székely Folk Music of Our Great-Grandfathers) (Csíkszereda, 2019) Pávai István 70 – Folk Music Concert (Liszt Academy, 2021; Csíkszereda, 2022)
In addition to state awards in Hungary, his native region recognized his contributions: Udvarhelyszék Culture Award (2017), János Kájoni Prize (2019), and in 2023 he was named an honorary citizen of Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc) and Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș).
[2024]