Hungary’s Rajkó Ensemble at Home Abroad: Socialist Cultural Diplomacy or Capitalist Commodity?

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Hungary’s Roma musicians have long traveled not as vagabonds, but as cosmopolitan touring artists with a home base in Hungary. During the state socialist period, Roma musicians had more opportunities to travel than other members of the population. One of the most interesting contexts in which they could travel was in the orchestras of professional folk ensembles. This presentation focuses on one important ensemble of Roma musicians of the state-socialist period, the Gypsy Orchestra of the Communist Youth League, commonly known as the Rajkó Ensemble, to explore the complexities of how these minority musicians were used as a national symbol during the Cold War. Ensembles like the Rajkó made “Gypsy music” more suitable for the new socialist era; in the context of international cultural exchanges, particularly the World Youth Festivals in which they were often featured, they played an important role in celebrating socialist youth and acting as musical ambassadors for socialist Hungary and for the Communist Youth League that sponsored their ensemble. At the same time they were a key element of an entertainment supply chain that brought in income for the country. Documents, press coverage, and interviews with former members of the Rajkó reveal the contradictions in the group’s representation and reception at home and abroad. First-hand accounts show how members turned their travels with this idealized socialist ensemble into a capitalist opportunity.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Lynn M. Hooker is Associate Professor of Music at Purdue 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 uses a combination of print sources and oral histories, with particular attention to the former members of the Rajkó Ensemble, to address the transformation of Hungary’s “Gypsy music” industry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.