This book is a collection of essays on highly-focused related topics, each essay self-contained, and each illustrated with music (and video) cuts offered in a password-protected companion website. The work is based on concentrated and meticulously documented fieldwork in Budapest, Bratislava, and Vienna in 2006-7, 2012, and 2014. Barbara Rose Lange is primarily interested in multifarious relationships between politics and music. The book’s main audiences will be students of this era and these places, plus those seeking case studies in how music intersects with gender and with other aspects of identity. Lange’s writing is extraordinarily clear, and she offers her discussion of the sound of music in layman’s terms; the reader need not understand musical notation or terminology. The level of detail concerning history and politics is both impressive and daunting. If I were to have a criticism of this fine work, it would be that background material can cross the boundary between generous and daunting, particularly in the introductory chapter. Most readers would be well advised to begin reading with any later chapter, and then to visit the introduction subsequently.
The 1990s—just after the end of the Cold War—through the financial crisis of 2008 was a fascinating transitional time in Central Europe. Governmental support of ethnographically-simplified and glamorized official folk ensembles waned in favor of complementary trends, i.e. looking wider by adopting mass media “world music” as it flourished in Western Europe, and on the other hand, in reexamining local music in individuals’ and non-institutional ensembles’ academically-informed and often virtuosic efforts. The case studies Lange presents in this book show musically- and entrepreneurially-talented performers doing something truly fascinating, infusing traditional materials with new nuance, often mixed with jazz and/or other art music (jazz is treated so very seriously in Europe). It is also interesting that several performers whom Lange researched eschewed the previously prevailing mono-ethnic presentations in favor of very real ethnic interactions, mixed with characteristics of village life, and how these performers managed to employ tradition to counter gender and ethnic stereotypes—the very uglinesses that hard-right politics invoked tradition to justify.
The first three chapters focus on music from Lange’s long-term cultural and geographic research turf, Hungary. The second chapter, “Àgi Szalóki and Multiethnic Femininity,” offers an especially nice case study. Szalóki is a woman with mixed Magyar (mainstream Hungarian) and Romani background who steps away from ethnic clichés and implicitly and explicitly criticizes far-right politics. Like a number of other Hungarian singers, she exchanged a successful career singing in a band for solo ventures. She conformed to the female pattern in that she sang rather than played instruments, but she edged back from the Romani stereotype, which included expectations of loud singing and rough timbres. An educated woman whose ethnicity is mixed to a degree not surprising in Hungarian rural culture, she strives for an inclusive approach in both sound and stage appearance, and indeed has performed at anti-far-right demonstrations.
The fourth chapter through the sixth chapter visit the multi-ethnic center of Bratislava, Slovakia. As in the chapters on Hungarian topics, the performers whose work is offered in these case studies are university-educated and ethnographically-sophisticated; these chapters focus on alternatives to the “scenic folklore” of the communist era. The seventh chapter, “Recuperating the Alpine Image in Austrian Music,” treats yodeling as technique and symbol. Just as many readers will especially enjoy chapters set in countries they know, I am fond of this one because I lived in Vienna in the mid-1980s, and so I could learn in this chapter about what has transpired since my stay in this corner of folk and folk-derived musics. The eighth chapter, “Local Identity, World Music 2.0, and Electronic Dance Music,” includes a short case study from each of the three countries concerning meetings of sonic slickness and nostalgic distortions (and thus of digital techniques and analog sources of traditional musics). The last chapter, “Sampling and Commercialization in Danubian Trance and Boheme,” concerns sampling in terms of techniques, symbolism, ethics, and law.
This book offers a fine series of manageably sized case studies that explore complex issues and intricate developments in telling detail, and without recourse to jargon. Students of modern Central Europe and of relationships between music, politics, and gender will enjoy reading it very much.
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[Review length: 708 words • Review posted on March 28, 2019]