A number of scholars from Hungary are approaching popular music from the standpoint of media studies, as well as providing more historical knowledge. Two recent books edited by Tamás Tófalvy and Emília Barna – professor-researchers at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics – show the scope of this work.
Pop Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem discusses how sociomusical processes affect and are affected by the media technologies of the late 2010s. The 15 contributors to this volume are specialists in media studies, communication and sociology, nearly all from European research institutes and universities. The chapters are grouped into sections on technology and network theory as applied to music, digital media, physical media, and case studies. In his introduction, Tófalvy argues that recent developments in information storage and organisation challenge the previous analytical frameworks of scene, subculture and genre. Within the volume itself, this plays out in different ways. Pablo Magaudda applies the notion of media infrastructure to music scenes, finding that human skills and the notion of the local remain important even as data management, blockchain and platforms are now defining features. Stéphane Costantini, focusing on networks, finds genre to be the more useful concept, proposing that peer-to-peer networking leads to more professionalisation of musical activity. Tófalvy updates the notion of underground ‘niche music genres’ (p. 48), focusing on transformations of subcultural capital. He traces a historical shift from face-to-face interaction through early and current peer-to-peer networking, arguing that ‘niche cultures’ (p. 68) utilising unique ways to share and communicate now accumulate underground cultural capital. Additional contributors take infrastructure as a major orientation. András Rónai, for example, discusses a trend of the major streaming services towards the frictionless user experience; when listener decision-making is removed in favour of algorithmic delivery, genre disappears.
The section devoted to taste and authenticity illustrates that these themes recur no matter how information is organised and transmitted. Barna examines the incorporation of lowbrow and middlebrow into highbrow with a discussion of the Song Explorer podcast, showing how intellectual distancing by male hosts continues as a taste-making factor, with only very recent changes (pp. 91–2). Jessica Edlom discusses online communication of musicians’ authenticity, finding that audiences will respond positively even to authenticity signals that clearly come from a corporate headquarters. The book section concerning physical media also addresses authenticity (see Magaudda Reference Magaudda2011). Zhongwei Li describes enduring conversations in the 2010s about a 1990s phenomenon: the recovery and sale of partially destroyed ‘cut-outs’, or discards of the Western recording industry, from the recycling plants of South China. Benjamin Düster details two contrasting ways that cassettes were important in 2010s Japan: as part of Japanese punk and noise culture, and as cute mementos of live pop culture events for female fans (the latter with bar codes attached for access to streamed versions of the music).
The last chapters of the book concern social media. The studies deal with small, specialised communities, emphasising audience and musician agency. Topics include the perceived ironic cultural capital of vaporware (Whelan); deliberately amateur video technique, conveying community involvement in the Galician underground (Uzal); techniques to engage the audience on- and offline through the Sofar Sounds presenting organisation (Riom); and audience responses on YouTube to mashups of political speeches (Williams).
Pop Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem presents the largely optimistic viewpoint that media trends of the 2010s were fostering creativity from the margins. The ability of performers and audiences to utilise any medium or interactive mode at hand to find each other is indeed impressive (although continuously exploited by monopolistic entities). A next step is now to take up inequality and violence within contemporary media infrastructures (see Tófalvy and Koltai Reference Tófalvy and Koltai2021).
Made in Hungary includes 14 chapters framed by essays on the study of popular music and a select bibliography. Many aspects of popular culture in Hungary are inaccessible to those not acquainted with this small country's history and its difficult language; this book adds much information, with sections devoted to musical scenes, history and case studies. The authors are scholars principally in media studies and sociology, as well as professionals in the music industry. The introduction, by Barna, details the origins of Hungary's popular music studies within sociology and musicology. Much popular music research ceased in the 1990s, and the 2000s then saw a reorientation towards current international methods and theories.
Part 1 of the volume is devoted to musical scenes. A study of Hungary's major international youth destination, the Sziget Festival (Szemere and Nagy), details how the event was conceived in the 1990s as a combination of the Bohemian and the commercial. The festival soon expanded its commercial side and emphasised a pan-European representation – not without incurring a conservative nationalist backlash (p. 21). Other chapters cover the representation of black metal in the Hungarian mainstream press, whose carnivalistic treatment challenges the key subcultural item of authenticity (Gyulai); and Hungarian jazz musicians, for whom a pervasive individualism is the most significant hindrance, resulting in a lack of success for this outwardly collaborative genre (Szabó). A study by Barna of the women's lo-fi scene in Budapest argues that the practices and networks of this bedroom music circumvent male perfectionism in mainstream popular music contexts such as live performances or recording studios.
A section on histories of popular music in Hungary considers present repercussions as well as past nuances; the Communist government's classification of forbidden, ‘tolerated’ and approved music is a persistent theme. Chapters in this section show how histories of some genres must be incomplete owing to their lack of recognition by the cultural apparatus (Vass discusses punk, Havasréti writes on funk). Ferenc Hammer discusses how Communist-era television programmes and recordings that featured the government-favoured pop artists now circulate on current TV; performers who did not have official acceptance have limited nostalgia value, because they could only produce poor-quality audio and video. Ádám Ignácz, building on previous study of the implementation of Stalinist political aesthetics into Hungary's mass song genre (Tokaji Reference Tokaji1983), discusses efforts within light popular music of the 1950s to purge jazz elements and to rely on two earlier Hungarian popular idioms, csárdás and verbunkos. Ignácz argues that audience response was so unenthusiastic that it led to cultural authorities devising the nebulous ‘tolerated’ category (p. 74–5).
The book's case study section covers individual artists and reception. Chapters discuss the world-music singer Bea Palya, who in some projects has presented a sonic critique of male hegemony (Rónai); the international reception of the Hungarian song ‘Gloomy Sunday’ (Patakfalvi-Czirják); reception of the underground musician DJ Palotai (Kálai); and reception of Emo by male adolescents in Hungary (Guld). Dániel Antal discusses the use of data analytics to identify emerging trends and genres. A conclusion, by Anna Szemere, addresses how Hungarian musicians connect with audiences outside the country; she identifies a dichotomy between the choice to become a virtuosic interpreter in a genre such as rock and blues or operate within international micromusical networks.
Made in Hungary, wide in its scope, contributes towards a more nuanced understanding of the history of music-making in the country. Together with Pop Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem, it illustrates a variety of theoretical approaches as well as many dimensions of community-making through popular culture.
