Music, City and the Roma Under Communism. By Anna G. Piotrowska. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 208 pp. ISBN 978-1-5013-8081-5

Abstract

Romani bands are an everyday presence in the public spaces of contemporary Kraków, Poland, as in many comparable European cities. Relying on their musical virtuosity and their intimate understanding of how to craft musical performances that appeal to their customers’ desires, they negotiate the precarity of the informal economy and the arm of the state as their predecessors and older relatives used to do in state socialist Poland. Yet their history in Kraków’s urban space, Anna Piotrowska shows in this detailed monograph, actually dates back to at least the early 19th century, when the Habsburg Empire had occupied southern Poland and Vienna’s musical cultures became strong influences on Cracovians’ tastes – if not to the mid-16th century, when there is evidence of Romani musicians at the court of King Sigismund I. This longer historical view, which also takes in the meanings and practices of Romani music in 19th-century Hungary and Bucharest to illustrate the transnational contexts that have shaped the musicians’ professional traditions, reveals that despite its title, Music, City and the Roma Under Communism is more than a study of Romani music and musicians in state socialist Poland alone. It also has much to say about their contributions to vernacular musical cultures before and after state socialism – always with an emphasis on agency, even as Piotrowska illustrates how Romaphobia, class inequality, attitudes to disability and state power have operated to constrain the conditions in which they have been able to exercise it. Piotrowska comes to this as an expert on Romani music in European culture who now turns this lens towards her own memories of experiencing Romani musicmaking in the streets of Kraków. These give her the situated knowledge to follow leads such as the life of the celebrated street violinist Stefan Dymiter ‘Corroro’, who died in 2002, but also to understand, for instance, just how comprehensively another dimension of Romani musical culture in state socialist Poland went on to be silenced by the communist authorities. This was the state-supported folkloristic ensemble ROMA, which formed in Kraków in the early 1950s, gained national recognition, performed abroad as part of Poland’s cultural diplomacy, and astonishingly defected almost en masse to Sweden in 1978 without their director’s knowledge after the Gierek regime had subjected him to years of escalating political pressure. Its premises in Kraków were turned over to new tenants, who disposed of all its papers, and never again would it be mentioned in the state socialist Polish press. For Romani musicians who had survived the Nazi occupation of Poland or had been displaced into Poland from further east during World War II, state socialism also profoundly affected the conditions for everyday and street performance in Kraków. At the same time as the socialist regime was representing Romani culture