Heartbreak and Reassurance

Driving in the car to a Dancing Heart gig a few weeks ago, I asked my car mates if they wanted to hear some new music. Yes, I hear them say. I warn that it is folk music and that it can be intense. I hear, What – are we not intense?

Then I start the title cut from the Hungarian folk group Muzsikas of their 1982 LP/CD Nem ugy van most mint volt regen…(It Is Not Like It Used To Be). The snarling double bass breaks the silence and lays down a defiant, rhythmic line, going on like this for some moments. Then, over the bass, a tight, insistent, ornate fiddle twirls and tumbles like a bird startling and vaulting from the trees. After these two have established their flight together, on top of this, the moment is seized by the flat unadorned earthy plaints of traditional singer Marta Sebestyen. The three go on together in this way, unambiguously, for all to hear.

Then, car mate Peter reacts, “Oh my – heartbreak and reassurance at the same time…” The music is startling, bald, bold as a hero, sensual and knowing. The New York Times called it, "Ebullient...raucous."

Muzsikas is an extraordinary group with a performing, touring and recording career that started in 1972. They are responsible for carrying forward folk music traditions that otherwise would have been lost. I first came upon them when I bought their remarkable CD Maramaros: Lost Jewish Music of Transylvania at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

I think I’m saying the obvious when I say many folk music players, singers, dancers and listeners go to the folk literature of stories, music and dance for a kind of soul food. We go for something that connects and nourishes us, through participation, to memory, emotion, beauty, and a sense of belonging. The music of Muzsikas can help engender this for me.

The folk corpus, taken as a whole, I believe, is about integrity – how to get it back after you’ve lost it, at a personal, interpersonal, village and larger level. I think it’s about how to make things whole. The Jungians and mythologists have written much about the dense psychological material embedded in the folk tales and sagas, and they show how they might be teaching stories, relevant to personal and community life. Intact indigenous peoples take care of their cultural stories as alive, precious and usually private, and involve themselves with them as a central part of community life.

I hunger for the feeling of integrity and wholeness, and I get glimpses of it now and then, and some of my deepest experiences of it can happen when I’m playing, singing, dancing or participating in a story. And that is why I keep coming back to the music, songs, dance and stories. And I keep hoping that I stay vulnerable to those flashes of beauty that might split my heart open to moments of communion with who and what is around me. Maybe the rich life is that lived with others inside a participatory folk opera of good heart?