Portraits of Musicians
Béla Kása (Tordas)

I never really ponder why I photograph musicians, I just do my job. I feel that this is one of the major duties of my life: to record for myself, for my children, and for posterity a world that I could only admire but never really be a part of, because I was born too late. Now I would like later generations to be able to see some of it, too.

János "Jánoska" Tímár, who plays the flute and gardon (percussive bass). Gyimes/Ghime? (Hidegség/Valea Rece), 1993.

That explains why I visit villages, especially the hidden regions of Transylvania. There I find what I had been missing for so long and believed to have been lost and forgotten before I set out for the first time in 1973. It turned out that there are still people and communities that have not abandoned their centuries-old traditions; not only that, but they carefully guard the riches entrusted to them, be it music, dances, costumes, customs, language, set gestures, or thousand-year-old working processes acquired from great-grandfathers.
It was twenty years ago that I began photographing the good people I call my musicians, but I know I will never finish the job because there will always be one more picture I need to take, and then one more, and then one more before I can complete the collection.

János Zerkula, prímás (lead fiddle), and his wife, Regina, who plays her gardon (bass) percussively. Gyimesközéplok/Lunca de Jos (Megálló), 1995.

Once I realized with a start that the great musicians I had always believed to be immortal are leaving us one by one. Actually, no one had ever taken much notice of them. As a matter of fact, no one ever thought to take even one decent picture of them for the future, even though they have devoted their lives to humbly providing generations of village communities with that great old music for the traditional festivities which themselves were handed down from their fathers and grandfathers. Most of them, often long lines of musicians, have left us without ever being commented on anywhere, although considering their talent, music, and technical skills their proper place would have been among the great stars of the world's stages. They would certainly have stood the test with honor.

Árpád "Kufuri" Csete, singer and flute player. Magyarszovát/Suatu (Mezôség), 1995.

I had always felt a little disappointed leaving concert halls, stadiums, and festival venues where I had seen and heard musicians of various nations making music. I could never understand why the outstanding masters of my own people could not get to the kinds of places they would have deserved.
I imagined János Zerkula, the blind fiddler from Gyimesközéplok (Lunca de Jos, Romania), being led onto the stage where the Rolling Stones and Paco de Lucia had played before. In his own category, he is just as great an artist as these world-famous stars. And then, in his deep, booming voice and with nothing more than his fiddle, Uncle Jani would ease into that beautifully doleful kind of song called a keserves, in which he lets loose all the pain in his heart. All the while, Aunt Regina, his faithful wife and fellow musician, would accompany him, beating out her peculiar rhythms on the ütôgardon, a traditional, trough-shaped, cello-like, wooden instrument-and they do this for hours on end without a break no less simply and exquisitely than they would at home in Gyimes, on top of the Carpathians, "close to God".
Then dancers who have still not forgotten how to dance to this strange and unknown music would come on stage and start a sort of dance like the cracking of a whip with its own set rules-yet completely improvised. Uncle Jani and Aunt Regina's instruments would be amplified just as Paco de Lucia and his seven other guitarists had to be in order to outdo the powerful rhythmic beat of his old flamenco dancer. Or better yet, far from the wild cracking of the dancers being overshadowed by the music, the two sounds should be balanced. One would support the other.
Today, I have stopped wishing that these simple, often illiterate, but wonderful people became world-famous stars. They are stars in their own right-even if only a few people know it. It is a great deal more important for these musicians and their music to somehow survive the gradual destruction of their craft. We will badly need this little part of our culture, even if there are those who would disagree.
We can see how empty the modernized music is among peoples whose truly traditional music has not survived and how they envy those who can enjoy themselves for days and nights just playing-or dancing to-their own traditional music: there is no chance to be bored, they do not have to come up with something new, something somehow better-what is traditional, what is old, is still good, if not exquisite.
However, if someone does decide to depart from the traditional and do something unique, he or she will certainly have something to draw upon. Fortunately, this has been proven countless times.

Béla Kása (1952- ) photographer, graduated in 1979 from the School of Art and Design at the College of Fine Arts in Cologne with a degree in photography and worked for two of Europe's largest illustrated periodicals, Stern and GEO. He returned to Hungary in 1982 and since 1985 has been photographing folk bands and musicians for the covers of recordings and brochures. He is also picture editor of the folk music journal FolkMAGazin. Béla Kása's work has been exhibited in Budapest, Gödöllô, Gyôr, Pécs, Szeged, and Szombathely, as well as in Austria and Denmark.