Romania: lăutari, tarafs and brass

Lăutari play christenings, weddings and funerals. They remember the village’s dances and the family’s songs. Dimitrie Cantemir already noted in the eighteenth century that the musicians invited were scarcely ever not Roma. The occupation outlived slavery in the principalities (abolished in the 1850s) and outlived several states.

A taraf is the working unit: violin, cimbalom or cobza, accordion, sometimes nai, bass. The doina is the long listening form. Hora and sârba are the circle. Urban Bucharest style sits beside the village taraf. The research map names Romica Puceanu and Gabi Luncă among the international names — see their pages for what we could source. Manele, later, is the urban popular descendant — loved, argued over, commercially huge, and still largely played by Romani musicians. Full chapter: Manele.

Speranța Rădulescu, who recorded lăutari from the mid-1970s, argued that muzică lăutărească is Romanian music kept alive by lăutari, not “Gypsy music” as a separate ethnic product. Both facts are true at once: the repertoire is Romanian; the players are, more often than not, Roma. UNESCO listed traditional lăutari tarafs in 2020 — a policy page, not a recording. Ethnophonie is the field series. Brăiloiu’s cylinders from 1928–1943 are the older tape.

Taraf de Haïdouks, lăutari of Clejani, became the foreign face of the string taraf in the 1990s. Fanfare Ciocărlia, from Zece Prăjini in Moldavia, did the same for brass. Neither group invented the job. They walked a local professionalism onto festival stages just as the village wedding economy was changing. Carol Silverman’s warning on Balkan brass applies here too: the world-music bill is not the wedding.

Transylvania sits on this map: Hungarian-speaking collecting (Bartók) and Romanian lăutari in the same mountains. FM Records issued a track titled Transylvania — Roma Voices (2001). Tourist clips titled Dancing Gypsies in Transylvania are not filed. The word Gypsy is their title, not this archive’s.