Petr Nuska at the seminar Monday 5. 2. 2024

Petr Nuska: Romani Chords: Uncovering Romani Practice for Harmonic Accompaniment with Sonic, Visual and Ethnographic Analysis

Abstract: The phrase “Romani chords” encapsulates Romani musicians' distinctively lush harmonic language in Slovakia. This musical feature is key to impressing non-Roma audiences and something Roma consider a root of their entire musical culture. Romani chords are not merely a sonic phenomenon, though. They reflect long-established economic practices in Romani professional music-making, skills in creatively re-interpreting music of the surrounding non-Romani majorities, and a particular form of musical learning whereby folk knowledge passes from generation to generation. Petr Nuska's upcoming MSCA project is the first of its kind that tackles this phenomenon in its anthropological and ethnomusicological complexity. The project is an interdisciplinary investigation approaching Romani chords as three types of data: sonic, visual, and ethnographic. The main ambition is to challenge the primacy of Western theories of harmony and to reconsider Romani chords from the Romani perspective, unearthing how Roma themselves perceive, conceptualise and theorise their chords.

Discussant: Mgr. Ondřej Skovajsa, Ph. D., The Museum of Romani Culture

Monday 5. 2. 2024, 14:00 CET

Large meeting room of the Institute of Analytical Chemistry of the CAS

Veveří 97

602 00 Brno

Entrance: Veveří 5. patro / 5th floor

ONLINE MS Teams: HERE

Pdf here.