Performing Câmpia: Processes of Ethnic Identification in Transylvanian Folk Music

Abstract

Transylvanian folk music is marked by conflicting claims about ethnic belonging. While it is common to label the csárdás a Hungarian dance and the hora a Romanian dance, songs performed by Transylvanian Rroma (gypsy) musicians are regularly claimed by both Hungarians and Romanians as “theirs.” This dissertation examines various processes by which trio transilvan music, a string band tradition that has been popular in rural central Transylvania for well over a century, is ascribed various ethnic essences and how these contingent ascriptions have hardened into a durable, fixed set of categories. Using clear examples of various violin playing techniques, such as a straight or bent left wrist, bowing patterns, articulation, trills, and other ornaments that exemplify the trio transilvan style, I trace the physical practice of trio transilvan musicians and set these examples in relief upon the history of folk music institutions in Romania and Hungary, and Bartók’s ethnographic work and influence on scholars. Drawing from my intensive ethnographic fieldwork in câmpia, a subregion of Transylvania, Romania, I argue that violin playing techniques are social acts, the performances of a musician’s concept of essential melody and embellishment, which is formed by their explicit training and informed by their habitus. Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and hexis are useful in this context because he deals with the performance and recurrence of unconscious actions, those invisible guideposts that circulate among a community that shape our physical and intellectual stance in the world. My findings generally support a processual stance on ethnicity: ethnic labels of music do not reflect inherent sonic traits (a music “DNA”) that can be uncovered as being Hungarian, Romanian, or Rroma as an a priori fact deducible by musical analysis, as Bartók and his inheritors would have us believe. Instead, the apparent ethnicity of folk music emerges from various forms of contestation embodied in performance, in narrative, and institutional processes.