János Sipos is a researcher of folk music, senior research fellow at the Institute of Musicology of the Centre for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a lecturer at the Liszt Academy, and the Hungarian representative of the International Council for Traditional Music. At the centre of his scholarly work is the comparative study of the folk music of Turkic peoples.
His distinctive career path was shaped by a combination of a humanistic intellectual family background, personal aptitudes and inclinations, notably a strong interest in music and mathematics, and decisive turns in his life. His father was a poet, his mother an ethnographer, and his brother, Mihály Sipos, later became the lead violinist of the Muzsikás Ensemble. He himself attended a music elementary school, studied the violin for ten years, graduated in mathematics at the University of Szeged, and meanwhile worked as a dance-house musician and band leader. A decisive moment in his life came when, together with his wife Éva Csáki, a Turkologist, he moved to Ankara for a university position. His several years in Turkey set János Sipos on the path towards an ambitious and compelling life goal, the study of the music of the Turkic peoples, to which he has since devoted his work.
Other domestic and international factors and circumstances may also have played a role in the shaping of this career. These include, for example, the renewed interest in Hungarian prehistory, the modern resurgence and debates of the Ugric–Turkic controversy, the strengthening of Turkey’s international role, the emergence of newly independent Turkic-speaking republics following the collapse of the Soviet Union, attempts at cooperation among Islamic peoples, migration waves in the Western world and their consequences, as well as analyses of the definitions, differences and perceived incompatibilities between Muslim and Christian cultures. All these factors have contributed to the sustained interest in, and the growing significance of, everything related to the Turkic peoples.
If we wish to give an overview of János Sipos’s career, the most appropriate approach is to follow his field trips, as these clearly demonstrate how his interests gradually expanded to ever wider geographical areas. His main regions of collection include Anatolia and Thrace in Turkey, followed by Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, as well as the Karachay communities of the Caucasus and Turkey.
Over recent decades he has spent approximately one hundred months in the field carrying out on-site research and has collected close to 10,000 songs. The results of these field trips have been published in books and studies. His books and articles also clearly show the development of his career: to date he has published 18 books and around 150 articles and studies in English, Turkish, Azeri and Hungarian.
In what follows, only the main points and key stages of this extensive and multifaceted body of work are outlined.
The starting point of this career can be dated to 1987, when he arrived in Turkey with his wife to teach Hungarian at Ankara University. János Sipos learned Turkish and, in the following year, began his fieldwork in the vicinity of Adana, an area visited by Bartók in 1936, then gradually extended his research to other parts of Anatolia. Between 1988 and 1993 he undertook eight field trips, each lasting two weeks. During these journeys he documented and recorded folk music material from 233 singers at 85 locations. The subject of his first books, Török Népzene I–II (Turkish Folk Music I–II), published in 1994 and 1995, was Anatolian Turkish folk music.
The closest linguistic relatives of the Anatolian Turks are the Azeris, among whom he conducted fieldwork in 1999. His book Azeri Folksongs was published in English in 2004, in Azeri in 2006 and later in Hungarian in 2009. The Ambassador of Azerbaijan highly valued the work of János Sipos and personally visited the Institute for Musicology to meet the internationally recognised researcher of Azeri folk music.
In 2000, together with Gergely Agócs, an ethnographer and folk musician, he carried out fieldwork in the Caucasus among two Turkic peoples living there, the Karachays and the Balkars. The material they collected was processed by János Sipos, who in his book summarised a comparative study of the music of the Kipchak and Karachay-Balkar Turkic populations living on the northern slopes of the Caucasus and in Turkey. This was A régi magyar népzene nyomában. A kaukázusi karacsájok népzenéje (lit.In Search of Ancient Hungarian Folk Music. The Folk Music of the Caucasian Karachays), published in 2012.
Together with his wife, Éva Csáki, he conducted in-depth research over five years, from 1999 to 2003, into the religious rituals of the Thracian Bektashi community living in the European part of Turkey, with a primary focus on their musical aspects. (The Bektashi faith is a Turkish form of Shiite Islam interwoven with Sufi elements, and it differs from the Sunni belief that predominates in Turkey. It also has a specific Hungarian relevance, as the Bektashi faith was the religion of the Janissary army, and it was within this religion that abducted or captured Christian children were raised. One of their highly revered saints is Gül Baba.) They released a CD and produced a film about the Bektashi community. Their book on mystical Islamic music in Turkey was published in 2009 under the title The Psalms and the Folk Songs of a Mystic Turkish Order.
János Sipos studied the folk music of two Kazakh communities on the basis of his own fieldwork as well as collections made by other researchers, including Dávid Somfai Kara and Éva Csáki. These communities live in south-western Kazakhstan and in western Mongolia respectively, at a distance of several thousand kilometres from one another. In the course of his research, Sipos established that while their language can be regarded as essentially unified, their musical traditions display markedly different characteristics. (Kazakh Folksongs from the Two Ends of the Steppe, 2001.)
Finally, his book on Kyrgyz folk music, which was published in English in 2014, should be mentioned.
From the extensive sound and visual material gathered during his fieldwork, he established a Turkic archive within the Institute for Musicology. In international terms as well, this archive ranks among the most significant processed collections relating to these peoples.
Comparative ethnomusicology has played a significant role in the study of Hungarian folk music from the very beginning. Generations of researchers have passed on the baton in their efforts to explore the questions surrounding the origins of Hungarian folk music. Throughout his career, János Sipos has paid close attention to his scholarly predecessors, keeping their work in view and seeking to situate himself within the scientific ‘family tree’, to find his place as the successor of illustrious forebears. Among these predecessors, first and foremost, are Béla Bartók, the only one among them who carried out fieldwork in Turkey in person, Zoltán Kodály and Bence Szabolcsi, followed by one of their students, Lajos Vargyas. Of later figures, János Sipos regards László Vikár and the linguist Gábor Bereczki as his direct predecessors on the basis of their joint Chuvash and Tatar fieldwork, and he also devotes particular attention to László Dobszay’s research on laments. (The lament is one of the archaic genres of Hungarian folk music, and it is undoubtedly related to the melodic world of the Ugric-era archaic layer, while János Sipos has drawn attention to its possible connections with Turkic melodic traditions.)
János Sipos links his own work above all to Béla Bartók, since he began his fieldwork in the very regions where Bartók himself had collected, and from which Bartók’s repeatedly published Turkish folk music material also originated. This connecting thread is also well suited to drawing attention to the importance of the subject through the name of the well-known, world-famous Hungarian musician. Sipos’s Bartók-related works were written in this spirit: his PhD dissertation, defended at the József Attila University in Szeged in 1999, bore the title Bartók Béla törökországi gyűjtése egy nagyobb anyag fényében (lit. Béla Bartók’s Turkish Fieldwork in the Light of a Larger Corpus), and presented a comparative study of Anatolian and Hungarian folk music. The study was published in English in 2000 under the title In the Wake of Bartók in Anatolia, and in Hungarian in 2001 as Bartók nyomában Anatóliában. Hasonló magyar és anatóliai dallamok. Together with the film director János Domokos, he also made a documentary film about Bartók’s Anatolian journey.
Let us also note what other fields of activity are involved in such a highly specialised scholarly career as that of János Sipos. In order to gain access to his research material he must carry out fieldwork, and in order to reach his subjects, who are often located extremely far away, he must secure funding, that is, he must apply for grants. János Sipos has written and submitted countless applications, and to realise his goals he has been awarded substantial scholarships from Hungary and from abroad. Following a successful application and the granting of a scholarship comes the acquisition of equipment, the organisation of field trips, and then the demanding work of collection itself. After returning home, the process of archiving begins, including the digitisation and cataloguing of audio and video recordings, the transcription of melodies and texts, and only after all this does the stage of scholarly comparison follow. An integral part of this process, especially given the international nature of the subject, is participation in conferences. Much like grant applications, this, too, constitutes an almost separate task within scholarly activity. It is here that opportunities arise for building and maintaining an international professional network. Over the past decades János Sipos has taken part in around eighty international conferences in addition to those held in Hungary. Beyond this, he plays an active role in the work of the International Council for Traditional Music, where he initiated the establishment of a special study group devoted to the music of Turkic speaking peoples, the ICTM Study Group on Music of the Turkic-speaking World in 2006, and also served as the group’s secretary. He is currently the Hungarian national representative of the International Council for Traditional Music.
János Sipos has built his academic career in a consistent and systematic manner. Most recently he completed and submitted his doctoral dissertation to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2016 under the title Török népek közötti népzenekutatásom eredményeiről 1987–2015-ig (lit. Results of My Research into the Folk Music of Turkic Peoples, 1987–2015), in which he reviews his work to date, characterises the folk music of the individual Turkic-speaking communities, discusses the Turkic connections of Hungarian folk music, and summarises the scholarly results he has achieved in the study of the folk music of Turkic peoples.
[2016]
More about his collections: http://zti.hu/sipos_gyujtesek/index.asp