In the 1920s, Walter Starkie, the first professor of Spanish at Trinity College Dublin, wandered around Budapest, across the Great Plain of Hungary and through Transylvania, travelling with his fiddle in search of gypsy music. His account of this journey, Raggle Taggle, remains one of the great literary accounts of Hungarian gypsies and their music in the mid-20th century.
Hungarian gypsy music, popular in hotels, restaurants and bars throughout Central Europe, has influenced a wide range of composers, including Haydn and Liszt. Today, however, the tradition is in decline, and the musicians who formed the original middle-class layer in gypsy society in Hungary are suffering from the recent social, political and economic changes.
Hungarian gypsies played an honourable and exceptional part in the country's history and its liberation. Many took part in the fighting during the Rakoczi war of independence (17031711), and Roma instrumental music gained fame, with several violinists entertaining the troops. Gypsy bands fought in the 1848-1849 War of Independence, and their music helped to keep alive a spirit of national resistance until the rapprochement with Austria in 1869.
There is a popular myth that gypsies are born musicians who brought their music with them on the long trek from India. The term "gypsy music" is used almost universally to describe a musical form and style which evolved in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But, according to a Hungarian academic, Istvan Kerekgyart o, this is not the original music of the Cigany or Roma people.
The emergence of a new musical genre, the verbunkos, or recruiting dance, coincided with the awakening of a sense of national identity among Hungarians. New gypsy bands successfully filled the need for entertainers in a newly-emerging bourgeois society, and made music-making the most attractive occupation for gypsies. At the end of the 18th century, there were fewer than 1,600 professional gypsy musicians in Hungary; 100 years later there were 17,000.
As fashions changed, "gypsy music" gathered a cult following, and by the end of the 19th century, gypsy musicians were performing across Europe, many returning home as feted celebrities. A gypsy "aristocracy" emerged, and they attained a respectable position in society. For more than a century, these assimilated Magyar-speaking, middle-class musicians have had little in common with the rural masses of Hungarian gypsies.
Even as late as 1968, there were still 7,000-8,000 gypsies making a professional living from music. By the 1980s, however, changes were beginning to make the style of the gypsy musicians a decidedly minority taste. Many bands started to emigrate, playing in Hungarian restaurants in Germany and Austria, or finding work in the US, Canada and Australia.
By the mid-1980s, these opportunities began to dry up. Cheap records and the privatisation of all restaurants and hotels meant "nearly all those who were left in the profession found themselves unemployed virtually overnight", says Dr Kerekgy arto. "For men who had been accustomed to being looked up to as the aristocrats of Roma society, it was deeply humiliating to be reduced to working as unskilled labourers, and indeed many were crushed mentally as a result."
Once they had drawn on their savings, the plight of these musicians became truly desperate. The younger ones tried to find work abroad, and in recent years "it is musician gypsies who have made up the bulk of the Roma leaving Hungary", according to Dr Kerekgyart o. But the cream among them put a brave face on it and in 1985 formed the 100-member Budapest Gypsy Orchestra, which has toured the world. Other talented Roma musicians adapted to changing tastes and fashions by cultivating other genres. The double-bassist Aladar Pege, who teaches at the Budapest Academy, gained a wide following as a modern jazz improviser in the 1960s and 1970s.
Today, there is a rising generation of young artists from families who for generations made their living as professional musicians in the verbunkosbased style, but have been brought up in an exclusively classical tradition. In certain classes taught at the Budapest Academy of Music, most of the students are from a Roma background. But their future is uncertain as Hungary produces more trained classical musicians than the country can absorb.
Young Roma musicians are also starting to make their mark in pop music. The best known example in Hungary today is the rap group Fekete Vonat ("Black Train"), who take their name from the Budapest-Debrecen train - notorious for drinking and fighting among the commuting workers returning home on Friday nights to the north and east, where over 50 per cent of Hungary's gypsies live.
The band's music is founded in Olah gypsy traditions and rhythms, but also incorporates American rap, jazz, and pop. They have been one of the sensations of Hungary's youth scene in recent years, attracting a mixed audience of Roma and non-Roma, and their first two releases, Fekete Vonat and A varos masik oldalon ("The other side of town") went gold.
But now the band has filed a lawsuit claiming their record company has refused to allow them to record their third album in their Romani mother tongue. They say EMI Hungary insist they must record Hungarian translations, too, or risk creating "resentment in the average listener".
The band now wants to break its contract, but EMI Hungary insists on holding the band to the release date. The band's manager, Jozsef Lakatos (known as Mogyoro, or "Peanuts"), told the Budapest Sun that the record label has threatened police action if Fekete Vonat try to make an album with another label.
The future of Hungary's latest gypsy music sensation is already facing problems, and the court case is unlikely to get a full hearing until December.
