The Music of Rumanian Gypsies

Extract

Franz Liszt thought that Hungarian folk music and the music of Hungarian gypsy performers were one and the same thing, and it took years of angry protest and patient exposition by Bartók, Kodály and others to unravel the tangle of ideas resulting from this ‘immortal error’. In Rumania, the connection between peasant music and the music of gypsy professionals is closer than in Hungary, but even so, in style and to some extent in repertory the two musics are distinct. To most of us, Rumanian folk music means fiddle music, fast, furious and exotic. Yet in fact the fiddle is rarely found in the hands of the Rumanian peasant musician. He has his own instruments—giant alphorns, five kinds of bagpipes, and countless forms of flutes. The fiddle, like the cimbalom and the pan-pipes, belongs not to the world of the peasant amateur but to that of the public performer, the professional minstrel, the lautar.