Papers by Margaret Beissinger
Folklorica, 2010
The following is a selected bibliography of recent works on folklore published in Romania and the... more The following is a selected bibliography of recent works on folklore published in Romania and the Republic of Moldova. It includes books published since 1990. An overriding constraint on the printing of any scholarly works in Romania at the present is the dire shortage of paper. Despite this, however, books do periodically continue to be published. Several monographs have appeared since 1989-both new and reprints of earlier editions (some of which have undergone a purging of communist ideological passages in their post-1989 publication). A significant number of collections have also come out (including materials that have been recorded recently or earlier in the century as well as reprints of "classics").
Music & Minorities
, we lost a dear friend and an extraordinary colleague, Speranţa Rădulescu, known for her lifelon... more , we lost a dear friend and an extraordinary colleague, Speranţa Rădulescu, known for her lifelong devotion to the traditional music of Romania. At the time of her death, Rădulescu was the leading contemporary Romanian ethnomusicologist, a distinction she had held for decades. Born in 1949 in Buzău (Romania), she moved to Bucharest and studied at the Conservatory (now the National University of Music). She was an ethnomusicologist at the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore from 1973 until 1990, during which time she earned a doctorate (in 1984) from the Academy of Music in Cluj. Following the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Rădulescu became a researcher in ethnomusicology at the Romanian Peasant Museum in Bucharest and in 2005 assumed an associate professorship at the National University of Music. Rădulescu was perpetually involved in the study, teaching, and presentation of Romanian traditional musics. It was her mission to explore, understand, appreciate and publicize the rich and diverse traditional musics and musicians in the many ethnic and religious communities in virtually every corner of Romania, a commitment that she took very seriously. Rădulescu was exceptionally prolific, publishing countless book chapters, articles, and books during her nearly fifty years of research. But she did not only write about music; she also documented it and released numerous recordings of traditional music and musicians from her extensive fieldwork. Rădulescu's audio publications are among her most valuable contributions to the study and exposition of the variety of traditional
Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review
This article treats, through the lens of marriage and nuptial practices, how lăutari (professiona... more This article treats, through the lens of marriage and nuptial practices, how lăutari (professional male Romani musicians who perform at Romanian weddings) and their families self-identify as Romanianized Roma. Lăutari assume hybrid forms of identity, drawing on both traditional Romani and mainstream Romanian culture as they perpetually create and recreate their own composite sense of “lǎutar space.” Lăutari, like many Roma, preserve basic norms of traditional matrimony, and weddings provide an arena in which they express emblems of Romani culture. Yet lăutari also invoke their “elite” status vis-à-vis “other Gypsies” by refuting what they view as “backward” marital praxes. Moreover, they both appropriate certain Romanian nuptial traditions as well as sustain a basic distrust of Romanians as non-Roma. While lăutar culture has evolved significantly over the twentieth century, younger family members are carving out their own shifting forms of “lǎutar space” in unprecedented ways, often...
Romani Studies
Abstract:Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how gender, ethnic identity, and ed... more Abstract:Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how gender, ethnic identity, and education inform career, marriage, and family in the lives of sons and daughters of lăutari (professional Romani musicians) at the intersection of traditional Romani and contemporary Romanian society. Sons are socialized to adopt the occupation of their fathers, becoming professional musicians who will support future families; they perpetuate traditional lăutar culture. While daughters are also socialized within the family to assume domestic "female" roles, most in my fieldwork have rejected them, deviating significantly from the traditional culture of their mothers as they pursue, instead, upward mobility and socio-economic empowerment. They are pioneering new roles for lăutar – and Romani–women. For both sons and daughters, journeys of upward mobility are distinguished by achievement and success but also by dilemmas of identity and belonging as well as tension and conflict as they reconcile traditional Romani and urban, modern Romanian lives.
Ethnologies, 1999
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
Studies of oral composition in epic poetry have traditionally focused on textual analyses. Howeve... more Studies of oral composition in epic poetry have traditionally focused on textual analyses. However, since oral epic is a sung genre, the relationships between text and music are fundamental to understanding oral composition. Does the music aid the singer in the composition of the text? What types of patterns are evident as singers combine text and music? What determines units of structure in the text and music? In an attempt to confront these and other questions, I will be analyzing the relationships between units of textual and melodic structure in the epic song repertoires of six contemporary Romanian traditional singers. Oral epic poetry is still a living tradition in Romania. Singers continue to sing their tales today as they have for centuries. The existence of traditional narrative poetries in the modern world, such as the Romanian genre, allows for extensive observation and documentation in investigations of both text and music. I argue in this article that Romanian epic sing...
Feminist Review, 2019
Staging Citizenship: Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania by Ioana Szeman is a bold new ... more Staging Citizenship: Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania by Ioana Szeman is a bold new look at Romani rights in Romania based on wide-ranging, insightful analyses of performance through dance, music, media and television. Grounded in twelve years of fieldwork among urban Roma, Szeman demonstrates through her discussions of performance how Roma in contemporary Romania are routinely denied fundamental human rights, including many of the basic privileges of citizenship, and thus repeatedly experience a loss of belonging-a fundamental privilege that every citizen deserves. Romania was admitted to the EU in 2007, a transition marked by expectations of improved Romani rights; yet, little has changed since that time as long-time racism and discrimination still inform the present situation for Roma. Szeman argues, through the lens of performance, that while Roma have legal citizenship, they continue to be deprived, in varying degrees, of the 'actual' citizenship rights to which they are entitled, including 'cultural citizenship': the right of civic belonging regardless of ethnicity, gender or class-rights that are part and parcel of the dominant Romanian populace. Szeman persuasively maintains that the citizenship gap-'the distance between legal citizenship, which most Roma hold, and actual citizenship, which the majority of them cannot access fully' (p. 3)-still typifies conditions for Roma in today's Romania. But she also shows, through astute readings of performance, that some Roma resist the mono-ethnic nationalism that prevails and manage, in diverse ways, to claim their rights of actual citizenship through various modes of cultural expression in performance.
The Journal of American Folklore, 1988
Journal of American Folklore, 2001
Winston provides a 30-year overview (1880-1910) of the introduction of the Salvation Army into Ne... more Winston provides a 30-year overview (1880-1910) of the introduction of the Salvation Army into New York City and its "sacrilization of secular space" (p. 367) through Christian missions, the Cathedral of the Open Air, and Christmas kettles and banquets. Overall, this book is an excellent collection of essays that must be read to be fully appreciated. Anyone interested in urban/ethnic/immigrant religion will find much of interest in this volume. One suggestion for future research would be to take Orsi's comment, in his introduction, that "specific features of the urban landscape. .. differ from city to city" (p. 44), seriously and conduct comparative studies of the same or similar groups in different urban environments.
Medieval Oral Literature, 2011
Folklorica, 2010
Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe is an impressive volume that deal... more Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe is an impressive volume that deals with the transitions that have occurred in Soviet/Russian and East European musical culture during the twentieth century. It deals foremost with how culture adapts to. reflects, and indeed is often emblematic of political change. As such, it is an impo"rtant and novel contribution to studies of Slavic and East European oral traditions and expressive culture in the contemporary world. An introduction by Mark Siobin (a well-known ethnomusicologist who teaches at Wesleyan University) that treats larger issues of modernity, identity, and continuity is followed by thirteen essays, ranging from discussions of popular and rock music to folk music revivals, Rom (Gypsy) musicians, the music of Muslim and other ethnic and religious minorities, nationalism, 1989 as a revolution, economics, and aesthetics. The larger East European framework, within which all of these inquiries are placed, here includes Soviet Russia and Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, former and postwar Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. Indeed, as Slobin notes, "the essays are case studies of specific musical milieus, which have implications for larger social, cultural, and historical patterns" (12). Like in many edited books, the articles are at times somewhat uneven in quality, but overall, they are informative and creative in approach, especially those in which concrete empirical findings are enhanced by theoretical readings. The thread that is woven through all of the studies in this book-in greater or lesser degree-is that politics and music intersect powerfully in times of change. In terms of recurrent themes, a number of key areas emerge in the volume as a whole. For one, the interplay between the intelligentsia and the masses in the formation, development, or manipulation of musical culture during different historical periods in East Europe is explored in several of the essays. Another recurrent concern-expressed in a number of studies-is the political (and particularly national) implications of various types of music-making as societies struggle for identity and recognition. Finally, several authors juxtapose minority musics during the communist and post-communist years, viewing continuity and innovation in political and cultural terms. Six essays address questions of how intellectuals (or figures controlling cultural dissemination such as in the media) affect traditional and popular music in East Europe. Barbara Rose Lange, in an excellent article titled "Lakodalmas Rock and the Rejection of Popular Culture in Post-Socialist Hungary," explores how the musical preferences of "ordinary Hungarians" are represented in "wedding rock," a genre that she defines as "the rendition on electronic instruments of rural Hungarian popular music ... derived from the nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Hungarian theater and dances songs known as magyar nota" (78), music
Speculum, 1998
... No matter how many texts he collected, transcribed, translated, and studied, the &amp;amp... more ... No matter how many texts he collected, transcribed, translated, and studied, the &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;song&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; is far from having run its course. ... In carrying forward their work, Albert Lord&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;s voice is also still living and keeps the song resounding. MARY LOUISE LORD Cambridge, Massachusetts ...
Slavic Review, 2001
Based on fieldwork (primarily in southern Romania), this article treats identity-construction amo... more Based on fieldwork (primarily in southern Romania), this article treats identity-construction among professional male Romani musicians, investigating in particular the discourse that they generate as they maintain their exclusive vocational niche on the boundaries of intersecting ethnic communities. Seeking to establish the influence of Romani musicians as agents in the construction of their own identity, Beissinger discusses notions that Romani musicians provide of non-Roms and other Roms (including other musicians), as well as how they portray surrounding cultural and political phenomena as expressions of their syncretic occupational and ethnic sense of self. Beissinger argues that Romani musicians are unquestionably enclosed by socially inflicted boundaries but are themselves also agents of boundary-making as they articulate connections with and distinctions from the world around them. Throughout, she draws pertinent comparisons with Romani musicians in other east European countr...
The Slavic and East European Journal, 2001
Page 1. ARTICLES GENDER AND POWER IN THE BALKAN RETURN SONG Margaret Beissinger, University of Wi... more Page 1. ARTICLES GENDER AND POWER IN THE BALKAN RETURN SONG Margaret Beissinger, University of Wisconsin, Madison ... In this article, I examine the return song in the Balkans as a socially normative narrative that charts traditional gender roles and behavior. ...
The Slavic and East European Journal, 1996
Recently, however, I am glad to say, a Yugoslav Classicist, Miroslav Kravar, who was at first neg... more Recently, however, I am glad to say, a Yugoslav Classicist, Miroslav Kravar, who was at first negative on the basis of the songs in SCHS changed his mind after the appearance of The Wedding of Smailagic Meho, as he indicated in a paper that he gave at the meetings of the 11
Sixteenth Century Journal, 1989
Page 1. PRINCE MARKO TATYANA POPOVIC Page 2. PRINCE MARKO The Hero of South Slavic Epics TATYANA ... more Page 1. PRINCE MARKO TATYANA POPOVIC Page 2. PRINCE MARKO The Hero of South Slavic Epics TATYANA POPOVIC One of the most popular of the south European epic heroesa counterpart of the French Ro-land ...
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Papers by Margaret Beissinger