Hungarian folk music group Muzsikas wins WOMEX award

(MTI) - Daniel Hamar, a stalwart member of the group founded 35 years ago, qualified the award as "a great honour not only for Muzsikas but the Hungarian folk music as a whole."
    WOMEX, the world's biggest professional music fair and showcase of world, roots, folk, ethnic, traditional, local and diaspora music, will be held in Seville from October 29 to November 2. Muzsikas will perform at the awarding ceremony on the last day of the event.
    On its website, WOMEX extolled Muzsikas as "the group of artists who put Hungarian folk music on the international map".
    In an essay to be published in the WOMEX 08 Guide, U.S. producer Joe Boyd writes, "exposure on the world stage certainly bestows pride and confidence on beleaguered traditional cultures. ... But it is not often that music places itself at the centre of the most important issues of the day, and even rarer that music touches the hearts and minds of those both within the culture and those who have only the vaguest notions about it. The Hungarian group Muzsikas ... has accomplished all of that and more."