all the stresses BElong at the BEginning. That's how you can always tell a Hungarian speaking English: he always says: 'I don't UNderstand, BEcause I am HUNgarian.' And that same accent naturally pops up in the music Why do we know immediately that that's a Hungarian tune? (I mean, besides the fact that it's got Hungarian words.) It's because the Hungarian language has a strange thing about it: almost all the words in it are accented on the first syllable. And that's the important thing we have to learn about today.įor instance, take a Hungarian folk-song that begins like this.

It all comes from the folk-music, which in turn comes first of all from the way we speak. And those speaking rhythms and accents finally pass from folk-music into what we call the art-music, or opera or concert-music of a particular people and that is what makes Tchaikovsky sound Russian or what makes Verdi sound Italian, or what makes Gershwin sound American. Sometimes these songs reflect the climate of a certain country or they may tell us something about the geography of a country or even tell us something about what the people do mostly, like being shepherds or cowboys, or miners, or whatever.īut most important of all, folk-songs reflect the rhythms and accents and speeds of the way a people talk, a particular people talks: in other words, their language - especially the language of their poetry - sort of grows into musical sounds. Of course, most of the folk-songs we know belong to the past, when the different peoples of the earth were more separate from one another, and their characters and different natures were easier to tell apart. What is folk-music, anyway? Well you see, folk music expresses the nature of a people - you can almost always tell something about a certain people by simply listening to their folk-songs. But folk-songs and folk-dances are really the heart of all music, the very beginning of music and you'd be amazed at how much of the big, complicated concert music we hear grows right out of them.

But it's not sung in any of those places: it's not even sung at all it's played by a clarinet, as you just heard, and it comes from a symphony by Mozart, Maybe that surprises you - because it seems so simple and natural, not like the kind of complicated and grand stuff we usually think of as being in a symphony.

Somehow it has that folk-song flavor, like something a lot of people might sing together, in a bus, or on a hike, or around the campfire. Now that's what you call a pretty tune, isn't it? Perhaps it makes you think of a song you learned in school, or at camp. Original CBS Television Network Broadcast Date: 9 April 1961

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