I am leaving Canada for Europe, Hungary, specifically. Hungary may be in Europe, but it is not of Europe.

Magyar is what they call themselves, their people, their tongue and their land. Further complicating matters, their name, confounding the English tongue, is not easily reduced to simple phonetics. Vowels and consonants are festooned with vestiges of font and serif, signifying sounds that likely didn’t originate in these parts, but somewhere beyond the eastern horizon of the Ural Mountains, where the Indo-Europeans never planted their tongue, where the Epicanthan fold begins. And like their tongue, their music is a synthesis, murmurs suggesting the journey to this land and the struggle to resist those who would take it away.

In the following weeks we will explore the music of Magyar, throughout the Danube basin and the Carpathians Mountains, Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine, Slovakia and Slovenia. Together we will seek out innovative and creative music, probing the stories behind the musicians, the music and the people to find where the these threads unexpectedly intersect. Our journey into the syncretic world of religion, culture and music begins in Mohács.

Magyar: “a” is “o” as in “cot”, “gy” is “dg” as in “judge”; “Magyar” becomes “Modgor”