György Stuber from the beginning of the 70’s has been collecting irretrievable recordings about the customs of the Moldavian-Hungarian bagpipe.

Performing Gergely Mesterke, János (Porondi) Duma, Mihály Dima, Péter Minuc, Ghiurca Petru, Antal Palack and Márton (Csurárka) Zsitár.

Details from the booklet:

I had the privilege to bring the first news about the existence of Hungarian bagpipers in Moldavia in 1973. Anthropologists and ethnographers were not aware of the existence of the Hungarian bagpipers in Moldavia. By now our foundation, called Petrás Incze János Csángó foundation, tries to preserve the ancient bagpiper tradition of the Csángó Hungarians.

The Ethnic group of the Csángó (read change) is a relic from the Middle Ages. That has survived in the "people´s melting pot of Moldavia. The Csángó are a unique "fossil" in some respects centuries behind our ages, with their preserved ethnicity, linguistic peculiarities, ancient traditions, and a great diversity of folk art and culture. This is exemplified e.g. by the existence of a seemingly ancient version of the Hungarian bagpipes, despite the fact that the bagpipes has been extinct among the Hungarians in the neighbouring Transylvania.

On the other hand they are hopelessly exposed to the very strong influences of their Romanian environment. By now they have reached a late stage of assimilation., their culture is on the verge of extinction. This is reflected in their bagpipe repertoire which is mostly, in fact almost exclusively consisted by the folk-dance melodies of the Romanian environment.

First I have met the excellent bagpiper, Gergely Mesterke in the village Külsörekecsiny (the Romanian names of the villages are given in the notes appended to the end of the Hungaria text in the booklet). In the next year I had found another bagpiper, János Duma (Porondi) in the village Nagypatak, who owned an almost identical bagpipe to the one of Gergely Mesterke. His bagpipe was bought by another person, Antal Palack from the same village. Recently, it was taken to the USA by Ferenc Tobak. I met Antal Palack first in 1991. At that time he could only play a few melodies on bagpipes. However, he was an excellent flute player. I tried to trigger the memory of Gergely Mesterke by contact him with the violinist Márton Fehér from the same village to play together. A non authentic way of playing. Still, it helped to brush up his repertoire.

To my surprise both instruments were similar to those used in Hungary in respect of the melody pipe, which had two reeds, one playing the melody, the other giving a rhythm by changing down a quart from the ground tune.

In 1997, I have found two bagpipers, Mihály Dima and Péter Minuc in the village Ploszkuceny, whose population is speaking the most ancient dialect of the Hungarian language, the so called Northern Csángó dialect. In this village bagpipers used another type of bagpipes which shows more similarities with the bagpipes of the Balkan, i.e. they have only one reed in the melody pipe and they are more simply elaborated. That type of bagpipe may reflect the Romanian influence. This hypothesis was comforted by the fact that Mihály Dima could play the bagpipe of the Romanian Peter Ghiurca, whom I met in a csángó village, called Trunk in 1997. In summer 2000 Mihály Dima´s could not play on his own instrument because it was taken back by Ferenc Tobak, who previously gave it to him. Thus, I was forced to borrow Petru Ghiurca´s bagpipe and ask Mihály Dima to play on it. He could play on it actually excellently. He pronounced that it reminded much the one he had many years ago. Also, he had some weak memories about that his father might have got his bagpipe from a Romanian piper.

by György Stuber