A formidable challenge to the study of Roma (Gypsy) music is the muddle of fact and fiction in determining identity. This book investigates "Gypsy music" as a marked and marketable exotic substance, and as a site of active cultural negotiation and appropriation between the real Roma and the idealized Gypsies of the Western imagination. David Malvinni studies specific composers-including Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Janacek, and Bartók-whose work takes up contested and varied configurations of Gypsy music. The music of these composers is considered alongside contemporary debates over popular music and film, as Malvinni argues that Gypsiness remains impervious to empirical revelations about the "real" Roma.

Preface Acknowledgments Chapter One: The Relative Neglect of Gypsy Music: Nationalism, Interest, and Advocacy in Musicology Chapter Two: Alms, Virgins, and Feuerzeichen: Literature's Place in Configuring Gypsiness Chapter Three: A Nineteenth-Century Tale of Two Others: Gypsy Improvisation and the Exotic Remainder Chapter Four: Nomads and the Rhizome: Becoming Gypsy Chapter Five: Brahms's Hungarian Dance no. 5 and the Dynamics of Exaggeration Chapter Six: The Poetics of Gypsiness in Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies Chapter Seven: Gypsies and Vol'nost' in Russian Music: Aleko Chapter Eight: Gypsy Pleroma: Janacek's Diary of One Who Disappeared Chapter Nine: The Specter of Bartók: From Hungarian Musicology to the Folk-Music Revival Chapter Ten: Gypsiness in Film Music: Spectacle and Act Chapter Eleven: O lunga drom: The Digital Migration of Gypsy Music Musical Examples Gypsy Music Discography References Index