Romani Music Collections, the Ruptured Archive, and Epistemic Justice in the United States

Abstract

Creating collections and archives of genres such as csardas, parallel to holdings of Romantic compositions based on those styles, affords a means for contemporary Romani performance to provoke institutional recognition of Roma’s historical influence on art music. This essay analyzes an instance of such a project at Oberlin College & Conservatory, while also advocating for a rupturing and resuturing of traditional archival data. A Storied People, an online Romani music project bridging collections of musical media and oral histories of csardas musicians in the Hungarian/Slovak Roma community around Cleveland, Ohio, USA, went public-facing in 2019, showcasing a Romani music collector’s donations and work by a Romani activist and historian in Cleveland, Oberlin Library staff and seminar students, and an ethnomusicologist. This article considers how acquiring the collection intervenes in 21st-century Romani music studies, musicological and archival practices, and their interrelations. Rather than having the collection sit for future research and pedagogical purposes, we connected it through two integrated online platforms to streamable, keyword-linked local oral histories relating to the collection’s traditions, performers, and compositions. The resulting online resource makes the music collection and oral histories more meaningful and accessible, at Oberlin and beyond. It thereby ruptures the collection, suturing its material resources to new musical performances and storytelling before it has a chance to reify into an institutionally contained unit. Addressing the sociopolitical context of this work and Roma’s ambiguous status within American epistemologies of race and ethnicity, the article analyses the successes and limitations of this approach to collaboration and the need for applied ethnomusicologists to learn from and integrate with applied community-making coming out of musical communities who have long been both wary of and invested in the processes of their public representation.