László Dobszay

music historian, folk-music researcher, church musician, joint leader of Schola Hungarica Gregorian Choir, and educationalist. In 1976 Dobszay became a department head at the Institute for Musicology, first in that of Melodic History, then that for Early Music History. From 1990 he headed the Folk Music Department, and re-established the Church Music Faculty at the Liszt Academy of Music. He instigated in the early 1980s the Cantus Planus Study Group at the International Musicological Society, which held its scholarly conferences in Hungary from 1984 to 2004.

His work of scholarship began as a folk music researcher. His 1975 dissertation on the lament style of Hungarian folk music won him a candidacy degree in 1975. Then he and Janka Szendrei devised a type system for the styles of the old layer of Hungarian folk music.

Dobszay, Benjamin Rajeczky and Janka Szendrei together raised plainchant research in Hungary to the rank of an international discipline, mapping its main structures and intellectual and methodological identity for a long time to come. In addition to his research, he paid close attention to passing on knowledge and findings and demonstrating them in music: he was at once a research, a practising musician and a passionate teacher. He, his colleagues and his students put forward and carried out many outstanding plans of research: systematizing the sources on Hungarian medieval liturgical music (System of the Hungarian Plainchant Sources, Studia Musicologica, 1984), and created a musical type system for the antiphon and responsory materials in Hungary’s codices of the Divine Office (Corpus Antiphonalium Officii-Ecclesiarum Centralis Europae), whose internet version, developed further, has become an indispensable tool for research. His last complete work (Corpus Antiphonarum − European Heritage and Its Hungarian Formulation, 2003) summarizes the stock of antiphons in Hungary’s sources for the offices according to the regional rites and melodic traditions, and places it in the linking system of European plainchant.

Obituaries and recollections:

• András Wilheim, Dobszay László In memoriam. HOLMI, 2011/november:
  http://www.holmi.org/2011/11/wilheim-andras-dobszay-laszlo-in-memoriam
  
  
• Zoltán Jeney, Dobszay László halálára (On László Dobszay’s death). Élet és Irodalom LV. évfolyam 36. szám, 2011. szept. 9.
  http://www.es.hu/jeney_zoltan;dobszay_laszlo_halalara;2011-09-07.html
  
  
• Gábor Kiss, Prefatio. Zenetudományi Dolgozatok 2011 „In memoriam Dobszay László”. MTA BTK Zenetudományi Intézet, Budapest 2012, 9-10.
  
  
• Péter Halász, Recollectio. Zenetudományi Dolgozatok 2011 „In memoriam Dobszay László”. MTA BTK Zenetudományi Intézet, Budapest 2012, 11-14.
  
  
• Zsuzsa Czagány, Commemoratio brevis. Zenetudományi Dolgozatok 2011 „In memoriam Dobszay László”. MTA BTK Zenetudományi Intézet, Budapest 2012, 15-16.