Cigányzene

Cigányzene (Hungarian for Romani music) is the urban Romani café and restaurant style of Hungary, performed by small ensembles centred on a primás (lead violinist), several second violins and violas (kontrás), a double bass, and a cimbalom — a large trapezoidal hammered dulcimer. The repertoire mixes Hungarian csárdás dance pieces, hallgató slow listening pieces, Romanian and Slovak imports, and operetta arrangements. Tempos range from very slow rubato hallgató through brisk csárdás above 130 BPM.

The Romani musician class in the Hungarian-speaking lands occupied a specific economic niche from the eighteenth century onward as professional café musicians, distinct from the rural Romani populations of the same regions. The lineage runs through the nineteenth-century primás János Bihari (one of Liszt's sources for the Hungarian Rhapsodies), early-twentieth-century stars like Magyari Imre, and contemporary primáses like Roby Lakatos. The style is sometimes confused with rural Romani folk music, but the urban café form is a distinct professional tradition.

The primás's bow technique includes long sustained notes with strong vibrato and abrupt rhythmic flourishes called cifra. The cimbalom's role is dual — it doubles the violin's melody in fast passages and supplies the chord rhythm in slow ones, hammered out with two felt-headed sticks. Hallgató pieces are entirely rubato; csárdás pieces accelerate steadily across the form.

Roby Lakatos's albums on Deutsche Grammophon are the most accessible modern documents. For older recordings, archival material from the Hungaroton label covers the mid-twentieth-century masters.

Franz Liszt's nineteenth-century Hungarian Rhapsodies drew their main material from the playing of Hungarian Romani café musicians rather than from rural Magyar folk song — the misattribution shaped European perceptions of Hungarian music for a century before Bartók and Kodály's twentieth-century rural fieldwork corrected the record.