43rd National Táncház Festival & Fair • 5–7 April 2024
Issue:
Starting page: 8
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1967-1971 Halmos and Sebő became roomates while at the university and began playing guitar together - singing Hungarian poetry set to guitar music. They entered folk song contests broadcast on Hungarian TV and became known as musicians. This is the period when they began to seek out the ’real folk songs’ that were actually sung in the villages and at the time, not available to the general public in the city. In this quest they met and became fast friends with folk music and folk dance researcher Martin György and his collection of field recordings of folk music. They began trying to play music as played in the villages (notably, the Transylvanian village of Szék). Martin introduced them to the director of the Bartók Folk Dance Ensemble. Soon they were playing for the ensemble’s rehearsals and performances…in 1972 they played at the the first dance house. Includes excerpts from interviews with Halmos, Gyenes Katalin, Sebő Ferenc
Inset page 9 – about the folk song contests televised on Hungarian TV in 1968, ’69, ’70. The contests were produced by Lengyelfi Miklós - a former dancer with the Hungarian State Folk Dance Ensemble that had gone on to be a TV producer. The televised folk song contests had great social impact inspiring the formation of amateur folk song groups in the villages and thus helped to preserve folk song traditions.