Vikár László, Bereczki Gábor
Tatar Folksongs

Initiated and commissioned by Zoltán Kodály, the first Hungarian music research in the original habitat of the Hungarians, a territory bounded by the rivers Volga, Kama and Belaya, began in 1957 and ended in 1979.

All scientific disciplines register the Hungarians as "turkified" Finno-Ugrians. For this reason it is imperative for us to investigate both origins. Researchers have long been devoted signal attention to the similarities, or differences in the languages, and songs of the neighbouring Turkic and Finno-Ugrian peoples.

Besides the previously published Cheremis, Chuvash and Votyak volumes, the Tatar Folksongs continues these former Volga-Kama musical monographies, but in actual fact, it is more: as the outcome of an extensive area research of a decade, it is a self-contained entity. Those, who read "only" this volume, without the precedents, will also get useful musical and linguistic information.

The fourth and last volume of the series contains 460 Tatar folksongs, including their detailed analyses, a short summary of the Tatar history and language, the English and Hungarian translation of the song-texts, notes, different musical indexes, bibliography, map and 20 original photographs.