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After Béla Bartók’s book “The Hungarian Folksong” (1924) and Zoltán Kodály’s study “Hungarian Folk Music” (1937), the third major synthesis of the Hungarian folk music tradition is Lajos Vargyas’ “Folk Music of the Hungarians”. It combines and improves the methods of Bartók’s descriptive, typological account and Kodály’s historical comparative analyses. Vargyas’ book was first published over 20 years ago, in 1981, yet its contents are still timely. Although it is a fundamental manual of ethnomusicology, it has long been unavailable and therefore its findings could not be duly integrated in the process of scientific research. This defect is the prime reason why the book has been newly published. Another reason is a favourable change: soaring interest taken in folk music, including its performance as well. Singing and playing folk music, dancing folk dances have been attracting growing masses who also have a greater demand for folklore publications.
The main innovation of the new edition is the restoration of Lajos Vargyas’ original intention to append the tune collection in an audible form, on ten CDs. [This CD-ROM attachment in the present volume]. The first edition was also to have had audio records so that the reader would get acquainted with the tunes in their full reality, their original sound and traditional performing style, in addition to their transcriptions which are indispensable for scientific analysis. Vargyas selected the examples with a view to both their transcriptions and audio versions.
In his book Lajos Vargyas writes: “The greater the scientific achievement that is condensed in a synthetic work, the greater the stimulation it gives for further research. These two syntheses have stimulated so much new research that it is time once more to summarize the new findings.” Vargyas refers here to the synthesizing works of Bartók and Kodály, and now this statement can be extended to apply to his own book, “Folk Music of the Hungarians”, which will certainly have a great impact on the subsequent development of ethnomusicology.

Published: September 2005.
ISBN 963 7374 11 6