Kazakh folksongs from the two ends of the steppe

Abstract

János Sipos Kazakh Folksongs from the Two Ends of the Steppe What business does a Hungarian ethnomusicologist have in the Kazakh steppe? Let us remember a beautiful wording by Bence Szabolcsi: “Hungarians are the outermost branch leaning this way from age-old tree of the great Asian musical culture rooted in the souls of a variety of peoples living from China through Central Asia to the Black Sea.” As Turkic people played significant role in the ethnogenezis of the Hungarian, there have been Hungarian several attempts to explore the music of these peoples. In the northern area László Vikár collected a significant material of Chuvash, Tatar and Bashkir tunes. Down in the south, Béla Bartók's collection in Turkey in 1936 aimed at the comparative exploration of Anatolian folk music, and we have to mention János Sipos’s Anatolian, Azeri, Karachay, Turkmen, Kyrgyz and Kazakh collections as well. The present volume is to afford a glimpse of the folk music of two Kazakh ethnic groups living some 3000 km apart: the Mongolian Kazakhs and other Kazakh people who moved to Turkmenistan and then moved back to southwest Kazakhstan in recent decades. The book contains the transcriptions of 156 songs, including their detailed analyses, the English translation of the song-texts, notes, indexes, bibliography, maps, several photographs and last but not least the reader find in the book a CD with the most characteristic and beautiful musical examples.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.