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This is the first piece of the Körispatak collection of Laszlo Lajtha. He published his collection in 1955. The people he collected the music from were not musicians but the prime violinists. The player of the bass and viola was only occassional player, and they were gathered together for to play to Laszlo Lajtha. In the summer time other two musicians were working outside the meadovs and played only in winter times, so Lajtha could find only the prime violinist from the original band. That's why the harmonies are far from perfect. They played instruments, which has some strings even made from telephone wires, too.
Laszlo Lajtha had been collecting music at Korispatak in 1943-44.
Soundtracks of his collection were mainly destroyed in 1944 with the original notes too. But the remaining he published in 1955.
There were two types of band in Korispatak. The little band consisted of three or for men (musicians were men, but it is interesting, that at Gyimes-kozeplok gardon was played usually by the wiife of the violinist (see my Gyimeskozeplok post today . it had the Instruments violin, bratsa and great string bass or cello, occasionally with a second violin-contra. the great band has a cymbal and occassionally another prime violin (he plays in terc or sext with the prime violin) and clarinet.
The prime violinist was the leader of the band. Cymbalist plays the improvized melody with the violin, makes contrapuncts, repeats the melody rhythmically, or makes the sound to be more rich with jumps.
Sometimes violin and cymbalom are in harmonic contradiction with each other, but it does not matter, because the main role of the cymbal was to give the band the richer sound - the band was "thin" without it.
The origial mode of cymbal-playing was the rigid, "knocking" style. They used not only the great table-like cymbal, but a little one hanged to their neck too.
Role of the contra and bass was mainly to give strong rhythm background to the dance. Contra sometimes is late with its harmony from the melody, the only important thing, that it must give sharp rhythm.
Bass sometimes makes free itself from the melody and plays rhythm formulas.
This information is a very crude translation from the Introduction of Lajtha's book.