Gypsies!

My Byzantine history professor once said something like:  “Civizalitions of Eurasia from time to time were shocked by invasions of barbarians that were mass-produced in the factories somewhere on the steppes of Russia.” It’s quite amusing that whenever Hashem wanted to stir things up in Europe (or in China), he sent a wholesale order for some barbarians to somewhere in Siberia, Mongolia or Central Asia. And things would start moving: civilizations would fall and rise.

Well, from musical point of view, gypsies remind me of this somewhat. Although originating in India (in most languages of Eastern Europe they are called “tziganeh”, pointing at the valley between Indian rivers Tzi and Gang), they’ve had a disproprtionate influence on music of Europe. Russian, Czech and Hungarian music comes to mind, but I am sure there are other examples.

This is a scene from a movie, with a gypsy singing and (later in the scene) dancing for some Ukrainians:



There are many gypsy scenes in Russian movies, but most have women singing or dancing (the first minute of this awesome scene has neither). Every time you have gypsies and Russians together, you somehow get overabundance of colorful clothing materials and mustaches.

A lot of Garik Sukachev’s music is influenced by gypsy motives. Here’s one of the more obvious ones:



And this is a piece of music influenced by gypsies, in a scene with Charlie Chaplin:



Here’s a piece of gypsy music played on guitar and balalaika:



I think the balalaika player is one of the more brilliant illustrations of the concept “people who could not hear the music thought that people who could were mad”. Imagine if someone who didn’t know anything about the concept of music was looking at this guy.