Music history of Hungary

Little is known about Hungarian music prior to the 11th century, when the first Kings of Hungary were Christianized and Gregorian chant was introduced. During this period a bishop from Venice wrote the first surviving remark about Hungarian folk song when he commented on the peculiar singing style of a maid . Church schools in Hungary taught Western Christian chanting, especially in places like Esztergom, Nyitra, Nagyvárad, Pannonhalma, Veszprém, Vác and Csanád ; and later schools began focusing on singing, spreading Latin hymns across the country.

Information about music education during this period is known thanks to manuscripts such as the Notebook of László Szalkai, Jacobus de Liège's Speculum musicae (c. 1330-1340, which mentions the use of solmization ), the Hahót Codex, the Codex Albensis and the Sacramentarium of Zagreb. The Pray Codex is a collection of "liturgical melodies ... in neumatic notation ... containing among other things the earliest written record extant of the Hungarian language, the Funeral Oration, ... independent forms of notation and even independent melodies (Hymn to Mary)" .

The first known example of exchange between Hungarian and Western European music is from the 13th century, the "first encounter with the more secular melodic world of the Western world" .

The earliest documented instrumentation in Hungarian music dates back to the whistle in 1222, followed by the koboz in 1326, the bugle in 1355, the fiddle in 1358,...
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