The Anatomy of a Benign Failure: Péter Szőke’s Ornithomusicology as Represented in Barátom, Bonca, a 1975 Hungarian Children’s Film

Abstract

The 1975 Hungarian children’s television film Barátom, Bonca (Bonca, my Friend; directed by Ilona Katkics, screenplay by Katalin Varga) contains a remarkable scene in which a ten-year-old boy is initiated into the idea of universal music through a declaration that birdsong has musical quality. In my article I show that the scene was inspired by ornithomusicology, the one-man discipline of Péter Szőke, whose (pseudo)scientific activity in Kádár-era Hungary aimed to prove that birdsong and human music were governed by the same neurological and physical laws. Attending to the history of its genesis, I dissect the scene to demonstrate that everything one hears in it is the result of four consecutive instances of failure: wishful thinking in science, misinterpretation, misrepresentation and misidentification, of which the first can be ascribed to Szőke, the rest to the filmmakers. I show how the filmmakers’ factual errors were conditioned by age-old concepts of European culture, and I conclude that these errors nevertheless contributed to the artistic authenticity of the final product. This authenticity is inseparable from a strong sense of environmental ethics, which is partly conveyed by the specific way the word ‘music’ is used in the film.