Week 7

In the near closing of the film “Latcho Drom” the viewer finds the Roma people at the end of their migration through the Middle East, yet at the very beginning of their migration through Europe. Tracing their movement through the Eastern European countries of Romania and Slovakia, the scenes from this portion of Latcho Drom tell of the suffering and hardship the Roma people have endured throughout their migration from place to place in search of a home.

It is important to note here though that this film in documenting musical and cultural heritages also indirectly homogenizes the Roma people as an uprooted, ethnic race of wanderers and musicians. To some extent having a collective history is important to the developing of a culture, but this can at times ignore the fact that many Roma now have actually found permanent homes dispersed throughout Europe, Western Asia, South America, and also North America. Still, that the Roma people in their history have endured discrimination and persecution cannot be denied.

Against open fields of brush and grasses, a wandering boy finds on a riverbank leaning against a tree two thin Roma men playing fiddle and hammered dulcimer (perhaps the santur). The fiddler accompanies his singing of political revolution in Turkey using inventive techniques such as dragging a single horse hair across one of the fiddle’s strings. From this scene the movie’s focus wanders to a small community of peasant homes, where locals with their fiddles, hammered dulcimers, accordions, string bass, and flute (perhaps the ney) meet outdoors to form a playing circle in some small yard. The music here is lively, fast, and active, with the fiddles playing fluently and in unison virtuosic phrases with the accordion and ney while the santur provides percussive accompaniment and the bass harmonic enforcement. To contrast, the screen is then taken to a moving train car where a group of women and a little girl sing long narratives expressing feelings of hopelessness, rejection, and hurt, describing in particular the ideas of being cursed in the eyes of God and of belonging to a downtrodden social caste. In another scene there is an old woman bearing numbers tattooed to her forearm in front of her cottage by a river singing lyrics telling of the hunger and death swiftly brought by concentration camps at Auschwitz during World War II. Between the years 1941 and 1945, the concentration camps at Auschwitz had murdered between 1.4 and 1.5 million people. In another scene (as far as we got in the film at least) one finds a Romani family living out of a tree house surrounded by plowed fields and a gray sky, again singing lyrics whose themes express the condemnation and misfortune that has befallen the Roma people.

Strictly examining the music of the Roma, since these scenes travel from as far as Poland to Romania it is difficult to trace a development of musical styles and techniques. Even crossing language barriers with Slovak, Polish, and Romanian, there is little more to point to musically other than trends in instrumentation, that singing usually takes on a personal narrative form, and that melodies are narrow in range and are heavily ornamented with tonal inflections.