Wedding Music and the Folk Revival
While popular with Roma and Slavic peoples alike, wedding music was a prime target for the party and the intelligentsia, who saw it as urban “bourgeois culture” and a threat to the new folk music. The folk style was described as “sweet,” “pure” and of a reasonable, danceable tempo. Wedding music, however, was dissonant, fast, loud and aggressive. Its scales were Middle-Eastern and Roma, rather than major or minor. It had rapidly changing keys and tempos and virtuoso solos. “Aggressive” is much more than an aesthetic term – it suggests the rebellious stance of the Roma. As an enemy of “pure” folk music, wedding music was by definition impure, as were those who created it. Complex solos, where musicians interrupted each other, ran against the Communist values of equality and submission. Their spontaneity symbolized freedom, another indication of the Roma's so-called aggression.
In addition, Papasov included international and modern influences, such as jazz fusion, Turkish melodies, saxophones, clarinets and accordions (accordions and clarinets have been played in Bulgaria for more than 100 years, but they were still considered western and therefore banned). Roma in Kosovo shared these tendencies, seeing music “not as a ‘frozen' product, but rather as a living and ever-changing organism” (Pettan, 1998) . The Roma did not value tradition and cultural purity, which were the hallmarks of folk music. This is precisely why their music has stayed relevant in the modern, multicultural world of post-Communism, while folk music is largely a relic.
The periods following g lasnost and perestroika brought wealth and prestige to the already popular Roma wedding musicians. The governments had relaxed their fiscal policies and allowed secondary economies – small private ventures that began in the early 1980s. As there was still not much to buy in the stores, families spent their earnings on spectacular weddings and the best wedding bands, often going into debt. The governments were incensed that Roma musicians were now making several times the state musicians' salaries, so they were heavily taxed. This was useless, as the musicians were given massive tips instead. Wedding music's popularity rose throughout the Communist era and exploded after 1989, particularly in Serbia and Bulgaria . It signaled a desire for a multi-ethnic, modern, urban culture that included Roma.
The introduction of cassette recorders all over eastern Europe meant that fans could pass around copies of live performances rather than subsist on the sanitized folk and wedding bands offered by official record labels like Balkanton ( Bulgaria ), Hungaroton ( Hungary ) and Supraphon ( Czechoslovakia ). The government had finally lost the little control it had had over Roma music. The spread of bootleg rock recordings began at this time as well and is still a huge industry.
Governments also tried to control festivals and contests that sprang up. They asked performers to audition and chose the more traditional bands, which were always the least popular. They forced bands to play certain songs and put a nationalistic, rather than rebellious, spin on the event. A fine example in Serbia is Guca, the “Serbian Woodstock” held each year in the village of the same name. Since 1961 Guca has been a festival of Serbian (largely Roma) marching bands. The origin of the brass orchestras is thought to be the Turkish military bands of the mid-1800s, which explains their eastern sound. Roma and South Serbian brass bands constitute the bulk of the bands and are the ones who define the sound. Nonetheless, they were relegated to smaller stages or not allowed to perform at all. Their live recordings sat on the floor in Guca's House of Culture (part of the government's Ministry of Culture), while those of their white, western counterparts were released.
Only in 2001 was a double-disc set released ( Golden Brass Summit ) that collected the best “previously unreleasable” material. Generous liner notes discuss how half of the repertoire was government-imposed during Tito's heyday (until 1975), including tributes to Tito and patriotic songs. These pieces were not included in the anthology, which focuses on the freer performances not controlled by the government, and songs that exhibit the truer influences –Turkish, Roma, Egyptian and most of the Balkans (save the West-oriented Croatia and Slovenia).
The Porta Festival, called the “Czech Woodstock,” is a similar event, but for electronic folk music. It began five years later (1966) in Czechoslovakia and attracted more than 30,000 visitors in the years preceding the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In general, the 1960s saw the formation of several festivals and a revival in the people's interest in folk music, something partly inspired by the concurrent folk music movement in the United States .
Though the folk revival swept through many countries, none had a more vibrant and singular scene than Hungary . Hungarians have been unique in their ability to keep folk music and dance a living entity, rather than something dusted off for annual festivals. The youth of the 1970s wanted an avant-garde sound that expressed their dissatisfaction with Communist folk music. Ironically, they found it in the old traditions remembered by their elders. As the songs were passed down, they retained the original context and sound (Frigyesi, 1996) . Modern influences have been incorporated, but they retain a Hungarian core, recalling the concept of a “folk soul.”
The music has been embraced by all elements of society – upper and lower class, urban and rural – much as Hungarian folk music was widely accepted and never shunned as peasant music. In fact, the dance house is more a part of the intelligentsia and its songs are shaped by the aesthetic ideas of the upper classes. The working class often tends toward lakodalmas , or wedding rock, which is similar in its multicultural make-up to electronic Balkan wedding music (Sarosi and Wilkinson, 2001) . And though a product of Stalin's horrific cultural policies, the amateur folk dance groups remain popular, even with urban youths. Many teach and perform in the dance houses all over Budapest , which attract dozens of enthusiasts of all ages.