János Jagamas attended folk music classes by Zoltán Kodály as a student of the Budapest Liszt Academy between 1941–44. As a result, he started collecting during the summers and then, after the war, on return to his homeland, Transylvania, he dedicated his life to the research of folk music. From 1949 to 1960 he worked for the Cluj-Napoca Folklore Archive of the Romanian Academy. His primary strategic approach to collecting was to fill in geographical ‘gaps’ and research the lesser-studied genres such as instrumental music, furthermore, to learn more about inter-ethnic folk music relations. He pursued determined and in-depth collection work in Transylvania, Moldavia and Partium at a time in history (the 1950s) when the later movement of amateur Transylvanian collectors had not yet started and official researchers from Hungary could only visit these regions very rarely and with considerable difficulty. He recorded several thousand melodies in both vocal and instrumental forms. For decades the majority of his collection lay untouched on the shelves of the archives in Cluj-Napoca, and thus unknown to the general public. In 2014, his entire collection was published with the assistance of the Musicology Institute of the Research Centre for the Humanities, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian Heritage House. István Pávai – editor of the publication and student of János Jagamas, associate professor of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music – compiled the programme of this concert from the less-known collections of Jagamas and his students for students of the Folk Music Department. Adjunct professor Péter Árendás coached the students for this concert.
Tickets: HUF 1 600
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