Ervin Major

Ervin Major (Budapest, 1901 – Budapest, 1967) was a Hungarian musicologist and composer whose work helped found modern musicology in Hungary. The son of the musician Gyula Major, he pursued his entire career in his native Budapest, where the history of his country's music became the centre of his intellectual work.

His training combined composition and philosophy. He studied composition with Kodály at the Budapest Academy of Music between 1917 and 1921, and at the same time took courses in philosophy at the Budapest Scientific University. In 1930 he earned his doctorate at the University of Szeged with a thesis on the relationship between Hungarian popular music and music of the folk tradition. Before that, he had edited the journal Zenei szemle (1926–1928) and served on the editorial staff of Muzsika (1929–1930) and Magyar muzsika (1935–1936).

Teaching occupied much of his professional life. He taught composition, theory and music history at the Budapest Conservatory and at its successor, the Béla Bartók Music School, periods spanning 1928–1944 and 1945–1963, and also worked as a librarian. He additionally taught Hungarian music history at the Budapest Academy of Music in the academic years 1935–1941 and 1945–1946. In 1951 he joined the musicological committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

His research focused on Hungarian music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He studied individual Hungarian composers, the relationship between popular and folk music, and the connections between Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms and Hungary, as well as foreign influences on the composers of his country. His method combined data from other disciplines with the use of public and private archives, newspaper libraries and collected editions of music, an approach that proves highly effective.

His writings include Brahms és magyar zene (1933), Liszt Ferenc és a magyar zenetörtenet (1940), Bach és Magyarország (1953) and Mozart és Magyarország (1956), as well as a catalogue of Erkel's works and the edition Fejezetek a magyar zene történetéből (1967). His compositional output encompasses chamber music, piano, organ and choral works, as well as arrangements of old Hungarian melodies.

Major is today remembered above all as a researcher. His studies of the ties between major Central European composers and Hungary, and of the legacy of the verbunkos, remain a point of reference for those studying the music of his country in the Romantic period.