No world music without folk music

Comment Mu Qian

Hungarians are proud of their music - and for good reason. The country has rich and diverse music traditions that are still very much alive today.

In Budapest last week, I was invited to a performance by the Buda Folk band in a cafe. It is a traditional folk band that plays with the violin, viola, double bass, accordion and cimbalom.

The show started at about 9 pm and the program finished in about two hours, but then different musicians joined in and jammed together. They played one song after another, as audience members sang and danced along. When I left, it was almost 4 am, and they were still jamming.

Folk music in Hungary is very much dance music, and the best place to appreciate it is in the tanchaz, or dance houses, where folk music and dance are a vital part of the social life of young people.

The Fono music club in Budapest is the coolest club I've ever been to. As most clubs around the world play the same kind of electronic music today for people to shake their bodies to, Fono retains an old rural atmosphere in a 21-century metropolis with a full house of young people dancing in traditional ways.

I tried to search in my mind for a similar place in China but failed. In Beijing, there are concert halls for formal concerts, or clubs for rock gigs, but there's no place where traditional folk music is taken as such an enjoyable and fashionable thing.

Tanchaz originated in the countryside, but functions well in the urban environment, thanks to Hungarian musicians who went to villages to collect folk music and instigated the dance house movement in Hungarian cities in the 1970s.

In comparison, we in China are trying to discard anything affiliated with farmers, who are the majority of the Chinese population. We try too hard to modernize everything, including our music, until singing Western- or Japanese-influenced pop songs at KTVs has become virtually the sole musical activity for most urban young Chinese.

The Hungarian classical composers Bartok and Kodaly spent much of their time in the countryside collecting folk songs that became an important part of their compositions. Generations of Hungarian musicians have followed in their footsteps to study traditional folk music and absorb it into their musical language, whatever that style is.

In China, the work of collecting and studying folk music is reserved for ethnomusicologists.

When composers do the work, they are often in such a hurry that they only have time to pick up some melodies for use and remain peripheral to folk music in general. Maybe it's more a matter of interest than of time.

As such, it's easy to figure out why China, which has such rich resources of traditional folk music, hasn't developed a more prosperous contemporary world music scene, which is based on a fusion of traditional and modern music.

Those few Chinese artists in the genre, like Dadawa or Sa Dingding, often know more about modern music than traditional music, while most of the masters of traditional Chinese music don't know enough about modern music.

Perhaps only when Chinese musicians have both a sound understanding of their roots and a wider perspective will China produce more interesting contemporary world music.

As Buda Folk's accordionist and flutist Soma Salamon puts it: "Folk music can exist without world music, but world music cannot exist without folk music."

Contact the writer at muqian@chinadaily.com.cn.