The study focuses on the detection, analysis and interpretation of the phenomenon of the use of Romani music in twenty-one or, more precisely, twenty Czech films made after 1989. Many of these films ...have been distributed abroad and presented at foreign film festivals. The research is grounded in a broader contextual characterisation of the emancipation of Romaniness and its concrete manifestations in science and culture in the Czech Republic in the period under study.
This paper deals with the musical street practice of the Roma people on the
territory of Belgrade. An attempt shall be made to present this practice in
its entirety, with all its particularities, ...based on data obtained in the
field (through interviews with performers), Internet sources (YouTube
videos, texts, etc.), and academic literature. The Romani practice is
possibly the most common street musical practice on the territory of
Belgrade, and while it is undoubtedly diverse, it still possesses numerous
characteristics which shape its particular identity. Therefore, the elements
of the aforementioned musical practice shall be presented and analyzed,
including: 1. forms of musical performance, 2. types of performing
ensembles, 3. choice and condition of the instruments used in performing, 4.
choice of musical repertoire, 5. the language being sung in, 6. choice of
public spaces at which it takes place, 7. events and special occasions
during which this musical practice occurs, 8. career development and 9.
child exploitation. The aim of the paper is to provide a relevant insight
into the special musical identity of the Romani street musical practice in
Belgrade by way of analyzing the segments of this street musical practice
presented. Moreover, the goal of this research is to construct a model which
may serve to conduct further research into the Romani street musical
practice in other Serbian cities, as well as enable a comparative analysis
and insight into the common, general features of this musical identity.
Šaban Bajramović was the most fruitful and most important, and certainly most famous and most popular Romani singer, composer and poet in the Balkans, crowned with the title "Tsar" of Romani music. ...He also represents an institution and authentic cultural value of a national group - the Romani, who continue the struggle for a dignified place under the heavenly vault even in the twenty-first century. The book by Dragoljub B. Đorđević, a Nišian sociologist of religion and a romologue, titled "I asked a little snail: my sociological story about Šaban Bajramović", published by Službeni glasnik from Belgrade, testifies about what needs to be done so that he can posthumously retain what he had achieved in life.
Over the past quarter-century, Celtic music has slowly declined on the global stage and been replaced as the de facto pan-European world music by a bricolage of Romani, klezmer and Balkan styles. ...These primarily East European musics have been adopted, adapted, fused, confused and ultimately claimed by northwestern Europeans as part of a wider project of reimagining their own identities in the post-Cold-war era. The music industry has not given a name to this trend, but the contributors to this volume have come to call it the 'New Old Europe Sound'.
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.
The Swedish band Räfven use the New Old Europe Sound to claim for themselves and their audiences a postnational, multicultural identity via Jewish and Romani cultural capital. The group facilitate ...their access to this capital by displacing their claim into a realm of magical realist theatrical fantasy, using (among other things) quasi-Aesopian animal archetypes in their imagery. They reinforce their claim by blurring the boundaries between identities-between human and animal, Romani and Jewish, Swedish and European, European and international, international and Jewish/Romani. Räfven deploy all of these mechanisms along multiple vectors, via liner notes, onstage patter, personae, and musical sound. Their claim functions primarily to promote anti-racist, pro-immigrant ideologies, by allowing both Räfven and their audiences to identify with groups known for their persecution and borderlessness. However, because Räfven is made up entirely of white ethnic Swedes with a primarily white audience, their self-fashioning as icons of multiculturalism also constructs racial homogeneity as unproblematic. Their work is thus just as likely to inspire activism (for audience members who are motivated to realise Räfven's vision of a multicultural utopia) as complacency (for audience members who imagine that they already are a part of Räfven's multicultural utopia).
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.
In 2008, Belgian video game company Tale of Tales released the 10-minute art game The Graveyard. The central action of this game consists of an old woman walking down a cemetery path, and then ...sitting on a bench. The game culminates in the playing of Dutch-language folk song 'Komen te Gaan', a nostalgic meditation on death written and performed by Gerry de Mol. The Graveyard's creators fashion themselves as artists within a cosmopolitan modern community, yet the game itself is steeped in nostalgia and haunted by the spectre of Belgium's place in World War II. de Mol's song, which functions as the game's centrepiece, manifests the New Old Europe Sound covertly; by obscuring its borrowings of East European and Jewish musical markers, it reveals an ambivalence towards the changing Europe that contradicts the game-makers' supposed dedication to multiculturalism.
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