History of Music in Hungary

Little is been known about the Hungarian music prior to the 11^th century, when the first Kings of Hungary were Christianized and Gregorian chants was introduced. During this era a bishop from Venice wrote the first existing remark about the Hungarian traditional song when he commented on the peculiar singing pattern of a maid. Church schools in Hungary taught the western Christian chanting, especially in the areas such as Nyitra, Nagyvarad, Esztergom, Pannonhalma, Vac, Csanad and Veszpre and later school started focusing on singing, spreading Latin hymns all over the country.

source of picture: www.ghs-mh.de

Information about the music education during this time is known for the manuscripts like the Notebook of Laszlo of Laszlo Szalkai, Jacobus de Liege’s Speculum Musicae (1330 to 1340 which mentions the use of solmization, the Hahot Codex, the Codex Albensis and the Sacramentarium of Zagreb. The Pray Codex is a collection if clergy melodies in pneumatic notation containing among other things the earliest written history extant of the Hungarian language, the Funeral Oration, independent forms of notation and even independent melodies (Hymns to Mary).

The first known instance of the exchange between the Hungarian and the Western European music is from the 13^th century, the first meeting with the more secular melodic world of the western world.

The earliest record instrumentation in the Hungarian music was trace back to the 1222, accompanied by the koboz in the year 1326, the bugle in the 1355, the fiddle in the 1358, the bagpipe in the 1402, the lute in the 1427 and the trumpet in the 1428. Thereafter the organ plays a major impact.

However virtually nothing is known about them, the Hungarian minstrels existed throughout the middle ages and may have kept olden pagan religious practices alive. At the Synod of Buda in the year 1279 the church stopped their members from listening to them, despite their having come to be employed by noblemen in courts. During the 14^th century instrumental music had become their main significant list and minstrel singers had become known as igric. The golden age of the courtly music which had followed the French models for most of the early middle ages before the musicians from Flanders, Italy and Germany arrived during the administration of Mathias Corvinus and Beatrice.