The writer is faced with no easy task when attempting to recount the life and professional milestones of Irén Lovász. One must trace a sequence of events of such richness, diversity, and exceptional quality as one rarely encounters.
Irén Lovász is one of the very few artists capable of describing the roots and distinctive characteristics of her art with scientific precision. At the same time, she belongs to that rare group of scholars who are able to present their scientific findings and insights – and the treasures that arise from them, treasures that speak not only to the intellect but also to the soul and the heart – with extraordinary artistic refinement through the means of performance.
We are therefore speaking of a unique and highly exceptional talent whose versatility knows no bounds. Year after year, production after production, she surprises her audiences alike – visitors of concert halls, academic conferences, and bookstores.
Irén Lovász is a first-generation intellectual who has experienced all the difficulties and joys that such an existence entails. She comes from a Hungarian family of the Great Plain; her parents supported themselves through manual labour. Singing folk songs evoking the isolated farmsteads of her ancestors from the Nagykunság region was a natural part of everyday life in her childhood. Her mother’s songs determined her entire life and artistic career. There was a song for every occasion – “a sacred one, a dance tune,” as the situation required. The Reformed faith also reached her heart through listening to her mother sing psalms.
Among her memories, one Christmas Eve stands out: at the age of four, her parents made toys for her by hand, and she repaid them with an entire evening’s performance, experiencing for the first time the immense joy her singing could bring to others. She always loved singing, and her kindergarten teacher advised her mother to pay attention to this talent and later enrol her in music school. This indeed happened: she began studying clarinet with the city’s excellent music teacher, János Apáti. She also sang in Kati Simon’s women’s choir, where she soon received solo parts, primarily performing folk songs on her own.
It was her choir conductor who first placed into her hands the fundamental Moldavian folk song collections of Péter Pál Domokos, as well as the works of the famous folk music researcher from Somogy, Árpád Együd. From there, it was a direct path to the dance-house movement, which was flourishing by the time she reached secondary school. She observed, listened to, and learned everything presented to the world by the founders, pioneers, and masters of this remarkable initiative. Meanwhile, competitions became increasingly frequent; the talented young singer participated in folk-song singing contests, where the ethnomusicologist Imre Olsvai – another great son of Somogy – often guided and supported her through his critiques and advice.
Irén Lovász was born on April 11, the same day as Attila József – a date now celebrated as the Day of Hungarian Poetry. Perhaps it is no coincidence that after graduating from an English-language secondary program, she applied to and graduated from József Attila University in Szeged with a degree in Hungarian language and literature, specializing in twentieth-century Hungarian literature. Music remained an important companion there as well: she sang with the orchestra of the university folk dance ensemble. She took singing lessons from Mrs. Pál Szél at the music school on Tábor Street and studied music theory at the college. Already in her first year, she began visiting the nearby village of Tápé, where she first started researching folk songs during the feast of Saint Michael. She went there on the recommendation of her influential university mentor, Professor Mihály Ilia, himself originally from Tápé (or “Tápa,” as locals say). He encouraged, supported, and carefully followed her first research journeys to Transylvania and Western Moldavia during her student years.
Soon she became personally acquainted with the Western Moldavia researcher Péter Pál Domokos, and thus began a lifelong passion: personal contact, collecting, and learning from wise peasant women and men who were among the last living witnesses of that old world, through whom one could gain insight into another way of life and mode of existence.
Irén Lovász has conducted fieldwork since the age of twenty. She neither likes nor uses the classic ethnographic terms “collecting” or “informant.” There are songs she was the first to discover, yet she was never driven by the quantitative indicators of so-called collecting. What interested her was the whole person, and the relationship between the song and the human being. One could say that from the beginning she approached people and culture with anthropological curiosity.
She sought not only songs, but increasingly immersed herself in the study of folk religiosity as well. During a research journey with her ethnographer mentor, the Kossuth Prize-winning Zsuzsanna Erdélyi, she met Margit Tóth Molnárné from the village of Fedémes, whose entire religious life, prayer habits, prayers, and relationship with God she analyzed. She documented all of this in her book Szakrális kommunikáció (Sacral Communication). (The same subject also appears in Irén Lovász’s candidate dissertation.)
Zsuzsanna Erdélyi also introduced her to “Mrs. E.” from the Bačka region, whose visions, dreams, image of God, and communication with the divine she describes. Later she also examined the apparition at Székelyvécke (Vețca), which occurred in 2013, in our contemporary age of mobile-phone photography. Since then, the site has been venerated as a sacred place, where a chapel and a Calvary have now been built.
With the openness of a religious anthropologist, she also approached and described the unique world of a Budapest woman who calls herself a medium. She characterizes her as “a contemporary urban, educated woman, a specialist of great influence and extensive scope who undertakes spiritual mediation.” A spiritual intermediary who moves between different worlds and helps others through her knowledge. The study based on conversations with this woman and those she helped is not only captivating but also raises important questions. Beyond these examples, Lovász has always paid attention to everything fate brought before her. She observed the thinking of intelligent peasant women attentive to every detail and integrated this knowledge into her own scholarly methodology.
When encountering these remarkable women and phenomena, Irén Lovász does not merely record data; each time she attempts to understand and comprehend what she encounters and then explain to her readers what she considers important among the vast amount of material she has gathered. This is an essential, rare, yet indispensable quality of a good researcher. Regarding the apparition at Székelyvécke, she writes in her most recent volume of studies: “I try to become acquainted with and understand every experience, because each one connected to the place is important. I would like to describe what effect this place – one I dare to call sacred – has on people.”
Irén Lovász herself coined the expression that encompasses these phenomena. It concerns the extraordinary, one-directional yet highly multifaceted relationship between God and human beings. “I call the ways in which humans establish and maintain contact with supernatural powers and forces sacral communication.” This is primarily prayer – that is, gratitude, thanksgiving, supplication, or simple devotion and contemplation. To this day she studies and teaches the various manifestations, systems of practice, and interpretations of this existing phenomenon. It is a form of communication in which only one side is open; the response does not arrive in words. She has written several studies on the theory and practice of sacral communication manifested through verbal and nonverbal channels.
Irén Lovász’s first workplace was the National Library, but she soon became a museologist at the Museum of Ethnography. There she encountered the collections of Kodály and Bartók, and there she also became acquainted with the work of Zsuzsanna Erdélyi and later met her personally. She developed a profound professional and human relationship with the Kossuth Prize-winning scholar, becoming her student and later the continuator of her scholarly work.
After the Museum of Ethnography came a position as assistant lecturer at Janus Pannonius University in Pécs, where she taught semiotics, communication theory, and cultural anthropology.
During the last four years of this work, she received a doctoral scholarship from the Doctoral Council of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and earned the academic degree “Candidate of Ethnographic Sciences” (PhD). The title of her dissertation was: Sacral Communication: A Pragmatic and Anthropological Approach to Folk Prayers.
After her work in Pécs, she became associate professor at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, where she is currently a research professor. She teaches not only communication and media studies and cultural anthropology, but also folk-song singing. It is almost unbelievable that among today’s Generation Z students there are every year so many applicants specifically for her folk-song singing classes that the rooms can scarcely accommodate them. The secret may lie not only in her wonderful singing voice, but also in her selection of songs, her explanations of them, and Irén’s personal charisma.
The scholarly field considers Lovász’s book Sacral Communication paradigm-shifting; it has gone through two editions and has become a widely cited university textbook. Her latest volume, Hang – lélek - hagyomány (Voice – Soul – Tradition), is a selected collection of thirty years of studies in anthropology of religion and music.
Although Lovász’s writings always elevate their readers into the heights of scholarship, they never abandon them there, and above all, they are never self-serving. Her style and phrasing emerge from inner experience, lived encounters, and a deep awareness of the importance of communication. She wishes her reader – whether a distinguished expert, a curious inquirer, or a “fan” captivated by her songs, someone who loves listening to her and appreciates her art – to become her companion, to converse with her, and to believe what she herself has experienced and lived through.
Singing has always been an essential part of her life. Not only because of the inspiration she received from her parents, but also because her own fieldwork and the performances of her contemporaries deeply inspired her. She sang with several ensembles and in 1987 received the title “Young Master of Folk Art.”
Irén’s singing is pure in every sense. It is characterized by precise intonation and perfectly understandable articulation of the text. Her vocal range seems almost limitless: from the deep resonance of overtone-like drone singing to sparkling soprano ornamentation, everything is present in her voice. Every emotion, interpretation, and message is conveyed through it, along with her own inner meaning. She understands the meaning of every word she sings and fully exploits their emotional power.
She performs early music, contemporary music, and fusion music as well, appearing with the most diverse Hungarian and international formations. To realize her artistic visions and creative musical projects, she has founded and directed several of her own Hungarian and international ensembles together with outstanding fellow musicians.
The musical genre known as world music began spreading increasingly in Hungary during Irén’s youth, and she too felt its influence. She became the first Hungarian performer to receive the prestigious German Record Critics’ Award in the folk/world music category. Afterwards she spent five years as the soloist of Makám, the uncrowned king of the genre. Her present works are still often classified within this category, as her mode of adaptation stands closest to it. Yet perhaps the best solution would be to create a separate category for Irén Lovász altogether, for her art is incomparable to anyone else’s.
She released a four-part album series under the collective title Gyógyító hangok (Healing Voices), exploring the possibilities of voice and the emotions and thoughts evoked by it. The parts are: Female Voice, Inner Voice, Sacred Voice, and Healing Voice. About the concluding album she writes: “The final piece and closing movement of the four-part album series is the album Healing Voice. It is the summary and essence of everything I think about the healing role and contemporary use of folk-song singing rooted in national tradition and performed in one’s mother tongue.” This musical flow is simultaneously an essence and a synthesis. The songs were selected with immense knowledge and great love, then performed with profound inner involvement, together with an excellent ensemble of collaborators.
Every one of her albums has been a success; she selected their material with outstanding sensitivity. She herself edits her albums, conceives and carries through the entire creative process, writes the forewords, and supervises the visual design.
Irén also defines folk music as a form of communication. She applies relevant approaches from communication theory to folk music in a persuasive and explanatory way: “The most important characteristic of folk music as a communicative phenomenon is that the community simultaneously creates and receives it… Communication takes place between self and self, yet during the communicative process the context and code of the message change within the individual, and the self itself becomes transformed: it is the same self and yet not the same. In folk music, genres such as lament songs, sorrow songs, and ballads fulfill this role.”
Lovász Irén belongs to that very small group of performers who can fill the country's largest concert halls with a programme performed entirely by a single, unaccompanied voice. Her name is a powerful draw for listeners who love folk song and its refined interpretations that support and deepen its content.
The achievements of this artistically extraordinary and profoundly influential career are reflected in her numerous awards, crowned by the Kossuth Prize she received in 2021.
Through her singing and through feedback from her admirers, she became aware of the special effect of her songs. When she learned that certain songs of hers were being used during childbirth and in other personal – and even clinical – contexts, consciously invoked for help, she began deliberately to engage with this phenomenon. Today she researches and teaches the reasons behind what she had long sensed: that folk song and singing possess extraordinary power. For years she has been participating in Hungarian music therapy training programs, and she herself has many memories of real healings and alleviations of hardship, even within her own family.
For this very reason, alongside performances that fill the country’s greatest concert halls, Irén Lovász also leads singing circles in several locations. Participants begin with an inner “sound massage,” and then, experiencing the catharsis brought about by folk songs, they leave as different people from those who arrived – according to their own accounts. The goal here is not stage performance, but the purification of one’s inner self, body, and soul from the social pollution burned into them by the metropolis. All this takes place through the highest level of aesthetic values and under the guidance of a master teacher such as Irén Lovász.
Irén Lovász sings and researches, writes and teaches, while enchanting those of us who know her – and for this we love her. Recently she has become attracted to a highly special and little-known field of study. She writes: “Recently the focus of my research has been archaeoacoustics, a new multidisciplinary field. As a singing performer, I became captivated by the natural acoustics of sacred spaces – from caves to small medieval churches, basilicas, and Gothic cathedrals. At international conferences where I lectured on the spiritual use of sound, I had the opportunity to become acquainted with this new scientific discipline. This is what I am working on now; I participate in international research projects and conferences connected to it.” She organized an international research group to investigate a rotunda in Upper Hungary, and who knows where this path may yet lead her.
The music of Irén Lovász is the sharing of the experience of a wise woman – in both the true and the fairy-tale sense of the term – a highly refined, deeply heartfelt, understanding, comforting, advising, warm caress of the soul transmitted through vibrating air. An embrace in times of trouble or difficult moments in life.
A learned woman who sings – this is a rarity, almost unbelievable. Scholars describe facts and communicate what they have discovered. They speak of things they have experienced, measured, tested, and found to be true. Here, however, we encounter an artist who is simultaneously a scholar in the traditional sense as well: someone who has experienced much and filtered the matters of life through herself. In doing so, she acts as the wise women of the old world once did – those who knew remedies for suffering, who applied ointments, soothed, healed, and comforted.
I chose as the title of this essay Irén’s early yet profoundly significant folk song from Kalotaszeg: Fellegajtó nyitogató (Opening the Gates of the Clouds). Through all her scholarly and artistic creations, Irén Lovász does exactly this. She opens the gates of the clouds – or the clouds themselves. Constantly she seeks entry from the earthly world of scholarly descriptions and studies into the celestial realm, enriched and gilded by her art, by love, and by immense knowledge. This quest is her life; it is the root of both her art and her scholarly thought.