SEBESTYEN REGARDS FILM MUSIC AS OFFSHOOT OF REAL LOVE

By CARY DARLING
Knight-Ridder

Americans know Marta Sebestyen from one of two places: as the haunting voice used in the theme music for the movie "The English Patient" or as the haunting voice used on "Boheme," the last album by Grammy-winning French worldbeat/dance alchemists Deep Forest.

Yet, for Sebestyen, these were mere accidental career offshoots from her first true musical love - ancient folk music of Eastern Europe, specifically those, such as the tanchez and csardas, of Hungary and Romania's Transylvania region.

Her latest album, "Morning Star," was recorded with the traditional group Muzsikas, which plays its interpretations of traditional Eastern European folk songs. Sebestyen and Muzsikas - featuring hammer dulcimer/bass player Daniel Hamar, violist Peter Eri and fiddlers Mihaly Sipos and Laszlo Porteleki - are in the middle of a North American tour.

"The majority of this music is played the same way as in the Transylvanian villages (for centuries)," Sebestyen said. "There's no need to rewrite or come up with new melodies."

In fact, she makes repeated pilgrimages to Transylvania to soak up the atmosphere and talk to the people.

"It's important for a singer to hold the hands of the old ladies, look into their eyes and live with them in their houses," she said.

Certainly, listening to "Morning Star," with its often haunting vocals and fiddle and dulcimer instrumentation, is akin to tumbling back in time to when villages were the centers of cultural life. Even at the beginning of the century, scholars traveled to Transylvania to get a feel for a culture that was beginning to disappear.

"The peasant people didn't understand how a professor could come from the city to their dirty village and find these songs," Sebestyen said. "They were more than suspicious. The first step is to get close and make friends. Some of our friends went to Transylvania, and they were confident and they'd ask an old man, 'Why don't you sing for us?' He would say, 'I'm not in the mood. Why should I sing for you? Who are you?'°"

Sebestyen discovered folk music in her pre-teen years, winning a singing prize at age 12. She began singing with Muzsikas in the early '80s, when traditional folk music made a resurgence among young people in Eastern Europe. The style was seen as a protest against the then-ruling Communist Party, which discouraged the unearthing of such cultural roots.

"I was very young at the time. I only sang the songs because of their beauty, not for political reasons," she recalled. "But I felt the power of the music. Many young people started singing it, and this was the beginning of the revolutionary movement. Folk music does have this power to pull people together."

Yet the music, coupled with Sebestyen's sometimes ethereal vocals, can be taken out of its cultural context and still work. Case in point: the use of Sebestyen's voice in "The English Patient."

"That's one of the stranger things that's happened in my life," Sebestyen said with a laugh. "(Director) Anthony Minghella had listened to our last three or four records and immediately fell in love with the songs. He never contacted me. At one of the gigs in Berkeley, he came backstage and introduced himself."

Minghella had already put the film together using Sebestyen's music. "He showed me part of his film, and I agreed with him," she said.

Similarly, the guys in Deep Forest - Eric Mouquet and Michel Sanchez - became enamored of her voice when searching for a centerpiece to their follow-up to their hit debut. Whereas that album ("Deep Forest") was built around the vocals of African pygmies, the new one would be centered around a different culture.

"They were listening to records from all over the world, they found my songs of traditional music, and they discovered they liked my singing," she said. "Eric and Michel each phoned each other and said they'd found something wonderful, and then they realized they each had been listening to the same songs. They made a demo tape, sent it to me and asked me what I thought.

"It was really shocking to me and strange to my ears. But I tried to forget about being a folk singer and listened to it the way a young teen-age guy would listen. There are so many ways to reach an audience, so I let them use it and we became friends."