Confronting Legacies of Ethnic-National Discourse in Scholarship and Practice: Traditional Music and Dance in Central Transylvania

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Ethnic-national discourse in traditional music and dance practice and theory in Central Transylvania is pervasive and persistent. Scholarship in the field has been deeply implicated in the elaboration and imposition of national ideologies by cultural elites and, while ethnicity is a naturalized category, the local practice of music and dance in social life need not be primarily so marked. The identification of traditional music and dance in this region as Romanian, Hungarian or Gypsy as established by 20th century scholarship and as institutionalized in practice is examined and critiqued. The beginnings of a re-theorization moving away from the re-iteration of these divisions is noted and the possibility of escaping from them in practice is considered.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Colin Quigley PhD. Senior Lecturer and Course Director in Ethnomusicology; Emeritus Professor, University of California Los Angeles. He was Curator for the 1999 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Romania Program, has published in journals such as Ethnomusicology and the Yearbook for Traditional Music, and has contributed the Music, Dance and Custom collection to the Indiana University EVIADA project. He is the author most recently of "The Hungarian Dance House Movement and the Revival of Transylvanian String Band Music" in the Oxford Handbook of Music Revivals and holds a Balassi Intezet advanced study grant at the University of Szeged in 2015.