43rd National Táncház Festival & Fair • 5–7 April 2024
Issue:
Starting page: 34
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"I had to go to the source (Part II)” Halmos Béla remembers Ádám István „Icsán” – master fiddler of Szék. Amongst other things, Halmos talks about his experiences learning from Icsán to play the Szék music. In Szék one learns solely on the basis of listening and watching. Halmos made a series of visits to Szék to visit Icsán from 1974 until Icsán’s death. Information collected from these visits he later wrote up in a monography. As Icsán told it, playing a wedding meant playing continuously for about 30 hours. Especially for the prímás, after such intense use of the musician’s nerves, body and spirit, by the end of the wedding, he can neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep; everything hurts – it takes time to get rested afterwards. Transcribed by K.Tóth László