Lajtha, László : Instrumental Music from Western Hungary - From the Repertory of an Urban Gypsy Band

László Lajtha pursued an independent course alongside his great contemporaries, Bartók and Kodaly, who were not much older than he. He drew up new horizons for research into Hungarian folk music-extending it far beyond wh at Bartók and Kodaly had ever done. His investigations into instrumental folk music led Lajtha to the urban gipsy bands who had their own purely unwritten traditions of playing, harmonization and instrumentation and whose repertoires he considered important despite their rather mixed character. He felt he had to expound his reasons for following this new line. In the introduction to his first Transdanubian collection he wrote the following-The juxtaposition of various pieces, old and new, a mix ture of styles, is intentional… anyway, the series `Dunantuli tancok es dallamok' may contain more Western connections than my Transylvanian volumes. It would be a mistake however, to conclude that the recorded material is not Hungarian as a result. Eas t and West are equally mirrored in Hungarian folk music, each molded to our own Hungarian image. This is what the present volume and the ones following it attempt to prove. This study contains fifty pieces of music (180 pages) transcribed in four parts f or strings.