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

The phrase “Romani chords” (RC) encapsulates the distinctively lush harmonic language of Romani musicians in Slovakia.

This musical feature is key to impressing non-Roma audiences and something Roma consider a root of their entire musical culture. RC 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. RomChords is the first project that tackles this phenomenon in its anthropological and ethnomusicological complexity.

The project is an interdisciplinary investigation approaching RC as three types of data: a) sonic, b) visual, and c) ethnographic.

The main ambition is to challenge the primacy of Western theories of harmony and to reconsider RC from the Romani perspective, unearthing how Roma themselves perceive, conceptualise and theorise their chords. The project aims to answer the following key questions: What role do RC play in the performance of Romani ethnicity?

What is the significance of RC for Romani professional musicianship? How do Roma learn RC, and how do they innovate them? And what is the role of vision in learning and teaching RC?

Action to address these questions is shaped by three specific objectives, which will be pursued through international and intersectoral cooperation between three participating institutions: I) Data collection concerning RC among Romani musicians in Slovakia (Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology, Slovak Academy of Sciences); II) Trans-disciplinary analysis of the data, employing methods of qualitative social sciences and computational (ethno-)musicology (Institute of Ethnomusicology – Center for Studies in Music and Dance, Portugal); III) Integration of knowledge about RC into a museum exhibition (The Museum of Romani Culture, Czech Republic).