A Szép Énekszó Muzsájához

Title:A Szép Énekszó Muzsájához by Zoltán Kodály
Performers: The Hartt School Tour Choir-2011
Instrumentation: SATB Choir
Culture: American Choir. Music is from Hungary.  

While I may be a bit biased because this choir consists of myself and all of my classmates, I believe that this choir does an excellent job at the re-creation of "world music." While reading Campbell's book this week, I found it interesting as to how there were several different stances on the re-creation of world musics in other cultures. One stance believes that the performance of music should stay close to its source, so that a reproduction of it can be pay tribute to the culture it comes from. This stance includes using enactive listening exercises and recordings, as well as performing the actual piece in an extremely similar venue to its original, if not returning to the actual place itself. The other stance regarding re-creation is taken by those musicians who are drawn to music because of its very nature as an expressive art form. They value potential for new musical expression that can emerge as an outgrowth of experience and training in a wide variety of musical traditions. 

Campbell makes the point that some teachers may have reasons to act as both conservationists and expressionists in their design of curricular experiences for their students. In my experience in this choir, I feel as though my director acted as both a conservationist expressionist. As far a conservationist perspective, we really tried to perform the piece while paying perfection attention to Hungarian diction and style. We did various enactive listening exercises, and repeated Hungarian vowels and consonants back and forth until we got them exactly right. He expressed that this was extremely important because if we got it right, we could easily make people forget that we were an American choir. Based on the applause we got after this performance, I think we definitely succeeded. Another way we stayed true to conservationist style is going back and performing this piece close to its source. This performance takes place in a church right in Budapest, for an audience full of mostly Hungarian people. I feel as though we really experienced this piece and paid tribute to its origin by returning to its routes. I feel like we strived for as much cultural authenticity as possible. If not then, we certainly had a sense of cultural validity, as we have discussed in previous weeks. 

In a way though, our director also worked as an expressionist. As a choir, I believe that we all experienced musical expression like we never had before throughout this tour. This experience gave us an appreciation for world music and performing it in within that culture. I did not believe my conductor when he said people were going to cry because our Hungarian was so beautiful. I saw a lot of tears though in the eyes of the audience when we performed this piece. While we were paying attention to hitting all of the right diction, we were also focused on being as expressive as possible. This expression gave us an experience like no other. Now I have a better understanding of what teachers should strive for when teaching world music. The conservationist approach clearly helps to pay homage to the country that is being performed, where the expressionist point of view gives the performers an additional opportunity to just think about the music, how to deliver it and what that experience will leave you feeling afterwards.