György Martin

György Martin (Budapest, 1932 – Budapest, 1983) was a Hungarian researcher devoted to folk dance and the music that accompanies it. His work lay at the intersection of ethnochoreology and ethnomusicology, and it remains a point of reference for anyone studying the relationship between traditional dance and its music in Central and Eastern Europe.

He trained in anthropology, history and literature at the University of Budapest between 1950 and 1954, studying under teachers such as Gyula Ortutay, István Tálasi and Lajos Vargyas. In 1963 he obtained his doctorate at the same university with a thesis on dance motifs in the Sárköz-Danube region. In the meantime he worked as a professional solo dancer in a folklore ensemble and, from 1955 to 1965, was employed in the folk dance section of the Institute of Folk Arts. After fieldwork in Ethiopia in 1965, he became a research assistant in the folk music group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; when this group was incorporated into the Musicological Institute in 1974, he was appointed head of the folk dance department. His candidature for the CSc, the degree equivalent to a doctorate in the Soviet academic system, dates from 1969 and concerned the round dance of Hungarian girls.

His fieldwork, which began in 1950, covered some five hundred Hungarian villages, as well as localities in Romania, Slovakia and Yugoslavia. He also carried out comparative research on the Carpathian basin and the Balkan countries, and was interested in the relationship between historical sources and the practice of folk dance in his own time. He wrote numerous works on the connection between dance and its music, on the structural analysis of dance types according to their motifs, and on the function of tempo, rhythm and metre in dance. His books include Bag táncai és táncélete (1955), A magyar nép táncai (1974) and A magyar körtánc és európai rokonsága (1979).

His legacy rests above all on the classification of Hungarian dance types and on his insistence that dance and music be treated as an indissoluble whole. His observations on the role of tempo and rhythm in dance are, it seems, a valuable contribution to ethnomusicological research.