Balkan Gypsy Music

“In his Moeurs et Coutumes des Tziganes (1936), the French ethnologist Martin Block notices that when a Hungarian or Romanian feels sad, or when, on the contrary, he wants to celebrate, he needs Gypsy music to exteriorize the state of his soul. (Block 1936, p. 136)¹ Block's conclusion that Gypsy musicians are in the business of articulating other people's 'soul' confronts us with an intriguing conundrum. Given the fact that in Eastern Europe, group boundaries between Gypsies and non-Gypsies are strictly defined and zealously kept up, one wonders how Gypsies would be able to articulate musically an intimate knowledge about their non-Gypsy customers. And why would Hungarians, Romanians - and, as I will argue in this paper, Serbs as well - need Gypsy musicians to 'exteriorize their state of soul"? In the Serbian town of Novi Sad, where I studied the musical and extra musical communication between Gypsy musicians and their Serb customers during bac- chic celebrations called lumpovanje,3 the idea that Gypsy musicians know how to reach and 'touch' the innermost being of their non-Gypsy customers is widely accepted. This is what Janoš, the violinist from a Novi Sad Gypsy band, had to say about it during an interview: The ideal is to give the customer the feeling that he's being understood. Didn't I tell you that we Gypsies are great judges of character, great psychologists! When, for example, a customer enters the restaurant, or, let's say, when a big gathering of fifteen to twenty persons comes in, you start to play ... [continuing in a whisper]... and then you watch their faces. Are they responding to the music? Are they interested at all?... How can you tell...? [I asked him] ...you feel it, you feel it! And you can see the expression on a person's face. Anyway, you then immediately adapt your program... aha!... there!... look!... now I should not play something sentimental. If I do that, I'll lose him. I'll go for something virtuoso, something more entertaining. I mean, it all depends on the mentality of the people, you know. That's what you should try to touch. Because if you don't know how to touch their mentality - I would imagine - people will not even notice you, they will not even see that you're there, that you're playing. You must touch the right string with people. It is just like touching the string of the violin, you see, that's how you must touch the string of people. And that is purely a psychological matter, something we Gypsies have learned since childhood. The Serbs, for their part, may respond to these intimations of being understood by placing themselves completely in the musicians' hands. Their efforts to build up an atmosphere of intimacy with the Gypsies would be inconceivable and unheard of in everyday life. In their desire for more music, more songs and more exhilaration.”