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Benjamin Rajeczky

(born in Eger, 11 November 1901, died in Pásztó, 1 July 1989)

 

music historian and folk-music researcher, doctor of musicology (1989).

Rajeczky

Benjamin Rajeczky joined the Cistercian Order in 1917. He studied theology and music history in 1920‒26 at the University of Innsbruck, earning a theology doctorate in 1925. While there he served as choirmaster at the Canisianum, an international hostel for theologians. In 1932‒35 he attended the Academy of Music in Budapest, studying composition under Zoltán Kodály. Rajeczky’s working life began in 1926 as a music teacher at the Cistercian secondary school (Szent Imre Gimnázium) in Buda. He became an adherent of the reform in music education initiated by Kodály. His activity and commitment resulted in textbooks ‒ Énekes Ábécé (Singers’ Alphabet), Kis zenetörténet (Short History of Music) ‒ articles in music periodicals (Énekszó and Magyar Kórus), and other documents of the early chorus movement.

After World War II, Rajeczky worked from 1946 to 1960 on arranging the folk-music collections at the Hungarian National Museum, where he helped to register collections made by László Lajtha, involved himself in folk-music collection, and joined in preparing the Corpus of Hungarian Folk Music. While editing Volume V (Laments), he became in 1960 deputy head of the Folk Music Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. After Kodály’s death in 1967, Rajeczky became acting director of the Group until 1970, so that he can take credit for the Csángó collections within Hungary (with Pál Péter Domokos) and a set of gramophone records presenting Hungarian folk-music traditions (Hungarian Folk Music, I‒III). Among many foreign invitations were regular lectures at conferences of the International Folk Music Council (now the ICTM), of which he joined the board and founded there in 1968 the Study Group on Historical Sources of Traditional Music. He wrote the introduction to the first major Hungarian review of folk-music data datable to specific periods, the two-volume XVI‒XVII. századi dallamaink a népi emlékezetben  (Hungary’s 16th and 17th Melodies in Popular Memory), edited by László Dobszay and Janka Szendrei.

After retiring in 1971, Rajeczky spent a full decade in the Melodic History Department of the Institute for Musicology editing Magyarország zenetörténete, I. Középkor (Music History of Hungary, I. The Middle Ages) in conjunction with László Dobszay and Janka Szendrei. Several decades of his work on plainchant and liturgical polyphony lay behind the summaries prepared on medieval Hungarian music culture and Gregorian chant. These researches had been inspired by a paucity of sources and knowledge, and by the scholarly approach of Kodály and the German music historian Walter Wiora. Rajeczky’s volumes of sources and melodies (Melodiarium Hungariae Medii Aevi I. Hymni et Sequentiae), in which he recommended ways for score publication of the full corpus of Gregorian genres, can be seen as a milestone in worldwide comparative history of plainchant. His experience equipped him to analyse and categorize thousands of later melodies for a complete edition of the antiphonal materials (Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi V), only concluded long after his death. He also earned undying merit in spreading musical knowledge ‒ for instance in the recordings entitled Hungarian Gregorianum, released by the Schola Hungarica that Dobszay and Szendrei headed, and in his book Mi a gregorián? (What Is Plainchant?). He taught in the musicology faculty of the Liszt Academy until 1980 and from 1963 until his death sat on the editorial board of the Academy’s foreign-language journal Studia Musicologica. In 1990, he received from the Hungarian state a posthumous Kossuth Prize.

 

    The Rajeczky bequest >

 

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