Heritage Institutions and Support for Hungary’s “Gypsy Music”

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
From the beginning of Bartók’s and Kodály’s research to today, “authentic folk music” in Hungary has been understood to be rural, and urban “Gypsy music” has been largely excluded. In recent decades, musicians and culture workers have struggled over the implications of this concept in new institutions of “heritage” [hagyomány]. In the words of museum studies scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, heritage is “a new mode of cultural production that has recourse to the past”–it “add[s] value” to old practices in a way that “speaks in and to the present, even if it does so in terms of the past.” That value impacts access to institutional and financial support. Hungarian Heritage House [Hagyományok Háza], the institution in charge of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble, the Martin Médiatár (archive of folk music and dance), and outreach programs for folk music, dance, and other folk arts, has cultivated a robust network of scholars and practitioners across the Carpathian Basin. While rural Romani musicians have served for decades as important informants for those scholars, urban Romani musicians have mostly been ignored, and fewer restaurants provided live “Gypsy music.” Beginning in 2017, Hungarian Heritage House supported urban Romani bands providing music in restaurants and cafés. This program has largely ended since the COVID pandemic. Using a combination of interviews and documents, this presentation shows how some urban Romani musicians have strived for greater acknowledgement of and support for their contributions to Hungarian heritage.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Lynn M. Hooker is Associate Professor of Music at Purdue University; previously, she served as faculty in Hungarian Studies at Indiana University. Her writings on popular, folk, and classical music in nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Hungary have appeared in Musical Quarterly, Ethnomusicology, The Cambridge Companion to Operetta, Twentieth-Century Music, Hungarian Cultural Studies, and Oxford Bibliographies Online. Her book Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. Her current project addresses the transformation of Hungary’s “Gypsy music” industry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries using a combination of oral history and print sources.