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Miklós Both

Composer, Founder of the Polyphony Project

Miklós Both is a Hungarian composer, performer, singer, guitarist, songwriter and ethnographer. He is the winner of the prestigious Fonogram and Budai awards, and performs with the Hungarian band, Napra, founder of Polyphony Project, Ukraine's largest online archive of musical folklore.

Napra's 2007 debut album, Jaj a Vilag, produced by Ben Mandelson, won the Fonogram award, Best World Music Album of the Year (2008).

The Rendhagyo Primastalalkozo CD 2010 made it to the top ten of the Songline Top of the World list.

In 2011, Miklós became the leader of the international gypsy integration project, Cafés & Citizenry, supported by the EU. The participants of the project came from Italy, Hungary, and Romania, took part in workshops and concerts.

Miklós represented Hungary in Copenhagen at the World Music Expo (WOMEX) 2011 with the Cafés & Citizenry musicians, with whom he later formed his new band, Both Miklos Folkside, in 2012. Since 2013 till now as ethnographer he made a large collection of folk music from many countries, among them China, Ukraine, Russia, Iran etc.

In 2015, Miklós received Hungarian award Öröm a zene! in the category: "Musician of the year".

In 2017, his team was granted the European Union's Creative Europe grant, for which he devised the application, as the founder and leader of the newly launched Polyphony Project. In connection with this, he entered a partnership with the Ivan Honchar Museum (UA), and Di Mini Teatro (FR).

In May 2018, recordings made over four years were published as the largest online archive of Ukrainian folk music (www.polyphonyproject.com), eliciting great interest and attention from all over the world.

By mid-2018, music, dances, interviews and documentaries had been recorded across nearly 130 villages; at this point, the database contains approximately 4 000 songs.

In 2018, he was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit of the Republic of Hungary.