On The Construction, Concept and Genesis Of Hungarian National Music Between 1750 and 1850

My dissertation project focuses on questions concerning the formation and perception of national identity through music and its bearers in the socio-cultural space of Hungary in the period between 1750 and 1850. In Hungarian musicology, there is a broad consensus on the establishment of the csárdás as national music from the 1830s onwards. This perception of the csárdás not only plays a role in Hungary, but was also received in a non-Hungarian context as the so-called ‘style hongrois’. The problem here is that the musical trends prior to this, in particular the student songs of the 18th century and the mixture with the verbunkos music, are often not included in the construction of a Hungarian national music. What processes can be observed here?

@ Reinhard Winkler

A critical examination of this research gap seeks to find answers to this question. On the one hand, I examine individual works from collections published in the period in question for musical parameters (harmony, rhythm, melodic patterns) and their regularities. One example of these collections is the Magyar Nóták Veszprém Vármegyéből [Hungarian Melodies from the Veszprém Region], published in 15 volumes from 1823-1832. At the same time, I link these findings with insights into the institutionalization of music, its bearers and the discursive genesis of the attribute ‘national’. Thereby, I try to develop an understanding of the musical and social processes that explain the incipient perception of music as typically ‘national-Hungarian’ - a research desideratum for this period to date. Methodologically, my dissertation project combines music-analytical, music-historical and socio-historical approaches.

First supervisor: Univ.Doz Prof. Dr. Hans Georg Nicklaus, ABU
Second supervisor: Assoz. Prof. Dr. Fritz Trümpi, mdw

Biography

Lukas Mantovan, born in 1996 in St. Pölten, is a trained violinist and musicologist. After completing his bachelor's and master's degrees in IGP and concert violin at Bruckner University, he studied musicology and dance studies at Paris Lodron University Salzburg and a master's degree in musicology at the University of Vienna. This was followed by an international concert and orchestral career as an orchestral and chamber musician.

Mantovan gained his first experience in musicological research and academic work in 2017 as part of the research project “Towards Interdisciplinary, Computer-assisted Analysis of Musical Interpretation: A Study on the Art of Herbert von Karajan” (funded by the Austrian Science Fund, P 29840), focusing on interpretation research with the Sonic Visualizer software and on Karajan's cinematic oeuvre, and in 2021 in a pilot project on computer-assisted interpretation research with an additional form-analytical approach “EARS - Early Recorded Symphonies Project” (both Bruckner University Linz). During his Master's degree in Vienna, he focussed his second research area on the interface between music and society, the construction of national music in the Habsburg region from the late 18th century onwards. He wrote his thesis on the construction of a musical national identity of Bohemia through the reception of the Königinhofer and Grünberger Handschriften.

Since November 2024, Lukas Mantovan has been working at the Institute for Theory and History (ITG) at Bruckner University as a research associate and research assistant, where his work attempts to bridge the gap between methods of historical musicology and music and form analysis.