The village choir and what it preserves

The village of Hollókő has a choir that has been singing together, in various forms, since at least 1923. The membership has changed entirely several times over. The repertoire has shifted. The occasions on which they perform have contracted as village life has contracted. But the choir exists, and on Sunday mornings in the church, and at Easter, and at the harvest festival that they have maintained against considerable odds, they sing.

I spent a weekend with the choir last autumn. I am not a musicologist and I have no particular expertise in Hungarian folk music, though I have been listening to it for most of my adult life. What I wanted to understand was not the music itself but the social fact of the choir: what it means to its members, what it preserves that cannot be preserved any other way, and what happens when it stops.

The answer to the last question is not abstract. In the neighbouring village, the choir disbanded in 2018, when its last four members — all in their eighties — could no longer reliably attend rehearsals. The songs they sang were recorded, transcribed and deposited with the regional folk music archive. The archive is well maintained. The songs are accessible. Something is nonetheless gone that cannot be recovered, because what was lost was not the songs but the act of singing them together, in that place, by those people, for those reasons.

This is not a romantic observation, though it risks sounding like one. It is a practical one. Certain kinds of knowledge — and certain kinds of community — exist only in their performance. They cannot be abstracted from the practice that constitutes them. When the practice stops, the knowledge stops with it, regardless of how many recordings exist.