Gypsy Music, Hybridity and Appropriation: Balkan Dilemmas of Postmodernity (original) (raw)
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DJs and the Production of "Gypsy Music:" "Balkan Beats" as Contested Commodity
Western Folklore, 2015
In the 1990s, clubs in Western Europe featuring remixed Romani music began to drawn large youth crowds of young people. This article analyzes the production of this soundscape, often trademarked as " Balkan Beats, " by a growing DJ subculture, comprised of dozens of performers on five continents. Focusing on the most famous DJ, Shantel, I explore musical marketing via issues of representation and political economy. I highlight the tenuous position of Roma in this music scene where non-Roma dominate as artists, producers, and consumers. Appropriation provides a critical lens to investigate Shantel's claims to hybridity and multiculturalism via his mythical personal history.
Gypsy/Klezmer Dialectics: Jewish and Romani Traces and Erasures in Contemporary European World Music
Ethnomusicology Forum, 2015
As klezmer and Balkan Romani music have become popularised in Western Europe since 1989, an increasing number of performers in both of these genres are non-Roma and non-Jews. This holds especially true for the new performance complex Gypsy/ klezmer that imputes connections between two of Europe’s quintessential Others, and, in transforming their ethnic specificities into a generic hybridity, facilitates the appropriation of their cultural goods by outsiders. I interrogate this complex and its semiotic conflation of Jews (absent Others constituted historically as over-present) and Roma (too-present Others who are historically absent) in the current European political climate that is multiculturalist but increasingly xenophobic. I note that Gypsy/klezmer performers claim a double authenticity based on a kind of hybridity that validates appropriation. I argue that specificities of Romani and Jewish geography, history and musical style are erased precisely as the Gypsy/klezmer complex becomes more popular.
This article explores the semiotic and performative negotiations of Gypsy tropes on the New Old Europe Sound scene by Romani brass musicians from Vranje, Serbia. Roma eager to access world music markets since the 1990s must engage with stereotypes popularised by the global hype for ‘Gypsy Brass’, characterised by two interrelated complexes: one conferring ‘authenticity’ by depicting Roma as pre-modern and passionate, and another connoting ‘hybridity’ through assertions of Romani rootlessness and perpetual musical borrowing. The juxtaposition of these tropes produces much-desired ‘authentic hybridity’ for western fans. While many Roma reproduce essentialisms to garner popular interest, they also strategically manipulate performances to resist clichéd impositions of Gypsyness, coding their practices as sophisticated artistry or inherent musical talent. Popular demand for Gypsy ‘authentic hybridity’ silences critical economic, cultural and historical specificities of Romani musical performance, however, re-embedding Romani performers within power relations that deny them full agency over self-representation and musical choices.
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The Oxford Handbook of Global Popular Music, 2024
This chapter analyzes popular Balkan Romani music by comparing contemporary local performances for Romani communities to those for non-Romani global audiences. Issues of genre, repertoire, instrumentation, text, and authenticity are examined, as well as the production and consumption of music. The author traces how the brass band became the most popular form of Romani music for non-Roma due to its promotion in the 1980s by non-Roma producers, lmmakers, and arrangers. In contrast, the most popular form of Balkan Romani community music is the electri ed and synthesized wedding band, which is, ironically, deemed inauthentic by most non-Roma. Moreover, wedding bands serve a transnational audience of diasporic Balkan Roma. Although these sites of performance and their audiences are very di erent, they are both embedded in processes of globalization. These two contrasting markets provide insights into the globalized nature of performative Romani identity.
STAGING ETHNICITY: CULTURAL POLITICS AND MUSICAL PRACTICES OF ROMA PERFORMERS IN BUDAPEST
Acta Ethnographica Hungarica
During the last two decades Roma musical styles have gone through numerous changes in Central and Eastern Europe. The effects of these cannot be assessed merely through changing musical performances and products in themselves, they must also be seen through the ways the Roma shape their relationships with their broader social surroundings. In spite of this, music-making is often considered as marginal compared to the mainstream issues of Roma research, justifi ed by oppositions such as the one between the 'sunny side' of cultural creativity and the 'gloomy side' of everyday life in Roma communities. This view can be supported by some of the academic accounts that depict Roma performers as 'apolitical' subjects who are closer to the members of the majority -in the role of service-providers -than to their own co-ethnics. This paper introduces a case that counters these assumptions. Based on the heritage of the Roma cultural movement in Hungary, Roma performers and their practices of music-making were placed in direct association with the struggles for recognition in post-socialism. Especially from the 2000s on, these musical and discursive resources were deployed by Roma performers in their project to create a music scene and a niche market in the subcultural landscape of Budapest. Through their participation in this market, Roma performers had been engaging with the micropolitics of recognition and social participation. The liminal space defi ned by musical events determined both the possibilities and the limits of the experiments in which Roma performers and their mixed Roma and non-Roma Hungarian audiences were involved. The paper discusses the development of this niche, including the content, the politics and the space of musical performance. 1
Politics, Activism and Romani Music: Interpreting Trends in Serbia, North Macedonia and Bulgaria,
The Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans , ed. Catherine Baker, 61-77. London: Routledge., 2024
Several music projects have emerged since 2019 that address critical political issues facing Balkan Roma, such as prejudice, unemployment, police brutality, evictions, and gender discrimination. These projects often eschew the usual portrayal of Roma as victims and focus instead on pride and agency. Why are these projects emerging now, and who is producing them? What forms and genres do they take, why and how are they produced, and what effects do they have? This chapter explores these issues by analysing the significant role of NGOs (those led by both Roma and non-Roma) via examples from Serbia, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria. It engages in media analysis, highlighting images, narratives, and texts (including published interviews), supplemented by fieldwork. Although I could not travel during COVID, I kept abreast of the release of new music products via Facebook and YouTube and followed promotional discourse as well as commentary by audience members.
Roma as alien: Music and identity of the Roma in Romania
2020
Plate 2.2-Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu as they appeared after their arrest and on trial Plate 2.3-1852 poster advertising 'gypsy' slaves for sale Plate 3.1-Cover of liner notes accompanying Roumanie: Musique des Tsiganes de Valachie Plate 3.2-Roumanie: Musique des Tsiganes de Valachie, rear of liner notes Plate 3.3-Nicolae 'Culai' Neacșu Plate 3.4-Gheorghe 'Fluierici' Fălcaru Plate 3.5-Outlaws of Yore / Les 'Haïdouks' d'Autrefois (I) and (II)-Covers of the liner notes Plate 4.1-En route to Clejani-Roderick Lawford Plate 4.2-'Strada Lăutarilor'-Roderick Lawford Plate 4.3-Caliu's kitchen-Roderick Lawford Plate 4.4-Gheorghe 'Caliu' Anghel (l) and Marin 'Marius' Manole (r)-Roderick Lawford Plate 4.5-Musique des Tziganes de Roumanie-Cover of the liner notes Plate 4.6-Musique des Tziganes de Roumanie-inside liner notes Plate 4.7-Photograph from the liner notes of Musique des Tziganes de Roumanie Plate 4.8-Honourable Brigands, Magic Horses and Evil Eye-liner notes, front and rear Plate 4.9-Honourable Brigands, Magic Horses and Evil Eye-inside the liner notes Plate 4.10-l'orient est rouge-front and back of liner notes Plate 4.11-l'orient est rouge (l) and Band of Gypsies (r)-a comparison of artwork Plate 4.12-Band of Gypsies-illustration inside the liner notes Plate 4.13-Artwork on cover of Maškaradă album Plate 5.1-Facebook publicity poster for Sistem ca pe Ferentari Plate 5.2-A Wedding in Apărătorii Patriei-Roderick Lawford Plate 5.3-Mitzu din Sălaj performing at Sistem ca pe Ferentari-Roderick Lawford Plate 5.4-Stall in the Piața de Flori (en.
Dancing on the edge of a volcano: East European Roma performers respond to social transformation
Hungarian Studies, 2015
The advent of a more open society in Eastern and Central Europe has created space for political and cultural freedoms unthinkable under state socialism, particularly for the Roma (Gypsy) minority. The years since the change of regime have revealed apparently insatiable appetites for “Gypsiness” among consumers, impresarios, and recording companies, and artists from the East Bloc, many of them from extremely modest backgrounds, have filled niches in the business of sating those appetites. Yet for many Roma in the region, the political changes of twenty years ago have been disastrous: the end not only of full employment and a robust social safety net but also of the limitations on free speech and rigidly enforced state monopoly on violence that hid racial tensions under a veil of oppression. This paper addresses the contrast between the conditions of the Roma population at large with the successes of a handful of successful musicians. It also considers the ways some musicians in Hungary are working to improve both the conditions for Roma and the perception of Roma by non-Roma in and out of the region.
The Gypsy Caravan: From Real Roma to Imaginary Gypsies in Western Music
2004
esting is, for example, the discussion of the ways in which the annual arrival of clothes and other luxury goods brought by a Western European NGO influences the mutual relations and power structure between the Romanian villagers and the hamlet Roma, offering the Roma a certain feeling of superiority by the trade and barter of clothes to the villagers. References
Music and Power- Gender and Performance among Roma (Gypsies) of Skopje, Macedonia
The World of Music 38(1):63-76. , 1996
Based on research from 1990-1994 in Shuto Orizari, a Rom neighborhood of Skopje, Macedonia, this paper analyzes the role of music and other performance arts such as dance, food and costume in creating cultural and political identities. Music and dance are shown to be gendered forms of power in two realms : within the Romani community at family rituals such as weddings and circumcisions, and in Rom/non-Rom interactions such as political gatherings and folk festivals. The relationship between economics, politics and the expressive domain is emphasized. Recent work on the role of gender in nation-building by Kligman (1992), Verdery (1994), Gal (1994), and De Soto (1994) has shown that the socialist nation was consciously configured as a paternalistic family, with the woman in service of the state, i.e., giving birth for the state. As Verdery says, "Biological reproduction now permeated the public sphere rather than being confined to the domestic one" (1994:232). There was, however, resistance to this ideology. As Verdery says, "the space in which both men and women realized pride and self respect increasingly came to be the domestic rather than the public sphere ..." (ibid.).2 The case of Roma of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (henceforth referred to as Macedonia) is illuminating in this light. Because Roma never really bought into the system of socialism and instead excelled in the black and gray markets (Stewart 1993; Silverman 1986), the public sphere of socialist life never was a great concern for them, neither economically nor symbolically.3 In addition, the larger sphere of macro politics and economics, whether socialist or capitalist, totalitarian or democratic, has historically given Roma many negative experiences-slavery, discrimination, and marginality (Hancock 1987; Fraser 1992; Crowe & Kolsti 1991). This realm of macro politics is now being contested by fledgling Rom political parties and unions (Barany 1994; Silverman 1994). The