Akadémiai Kiadó

      As Turkic people played a significant role in the ethnogenezis of the Hungarians, it goes without saying that there have been a number of Hungarian attempts to explore the music of these peoples.

      In the northern area László Vikár collected a significant material of Chuvash, Tatar and Bashkir tunes. Down in the south, Béla Bartók's collection in Turkey in 1936, aimed at the comparative exploration of Anatolian folk music, launched the work, which was joined by János Sipos's Anatolian, Azeri and Kazakh collections in 1987-93.

      The authors of this volume have succeeded in conducting several field researches among Kazakhs. The reader can get an inside view of the folk music of two Kazakh ethnic groups living some 3000 km apart: the Mongolian Kazakhs and other Kazakh people who moved to Turkmenistan and then moved back to southwest Kazakhstan in recent decades.

      The volume contains the transcriptions of 156 songs, including their detailed analyses, the English translation of the song-texts, notes, indexes, bibliography, maps, several photographs, and last but not least the reader can find a CD in the book with the most characteristic and beautiful musical examples.