“Music for Millions”. János Maróthy and Academic Researchon Popular Music in Socialist Hungary
“Music for Millions”. János Maróthy and Academic Researchon Popular Music in Socialist Hungary

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I demonstrate the changes in János Maróthy’s aesthetic and political atitudes towards popular music. Being an internationally acknowledged Marxist musicologist, Maróthy found employment in many important musical institutions, in the framework of which he not only had an overview of the events of Hungarian popular music, but with his presentations and articles, in the 1950s and early 1960s he also exerted a considerable infuence on them. Using archival data and media coverage, I examine Maróthy’s key texts which demanded a revision in the mater of “socialist realism” and which announced a growing atention and tolerance towards the musical products of Western “mass culture”: jazz and pop-rock. His work shows how popular music became a part of academic research in Socialist Hungary.

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