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— This project, aimed at the recovery, inventory, cataloguing, conservation, coding, archiving, evaluation and dissemination of Gypsy-inspired music and music pertaining to the Sinti and Romanies/Gypsies in each country as an inalienable, indispensable, transcendental and significant part of the European cultural identity, whose first stage of development began in 2004 in Spain (home of the Project coordinator and director) Germany, France, Hungary and Rumania (co-organisers and/or associates). The second project phase will cover from 2008 to 2013, and will incorporate additional associate countries.
— It covers symphonic, “exact” or “cultured”, classical and contemporary music and so-called light, traditional or popular music (intuitive, open, deductive, spontaneous “folklore” is the soul and origin of all music), composed, performed and spread throughout Europe – unpublished or passed down through the generations, published or produced for elites – and inspired by sources collected, conveyed and contributed by the Romanies/Gypsies since the beginning of their diaspora from East to West at the dawn of the 11th century.
• From the beautiful, original heritage that the Romany/Gypsy presence has bequeathed to the majority European societies with which it has coexisted – from the arrival of the Romanies/Gypsies in the old continent up to the present in their secular wanderings – music stands out as a model of universal human greatness in a syncretic, synergic, interactive process of contributions, loans and “appropriations” enriched by contact with other learned ancestral traditions and more recent creations, metabolized with the autochthonous cultures of this “hell and paradise of Europe, a mixture of golden and dark ages”.
• Traditionally composed “by heart” and performed “by ear”, the genius of its creators and performers has induced, suggested or aroused echoes, melismata and fragrances of the Romany/Gypsy soul in the most outstanding “non-Gypsy” figures of European and even universal music, in a multiplicity of forms and manifestations – from classicism and romanticism to impressionism and post-modernity – impregnating and influencing local music in widely differing territories with traces of the art, the feelings it expresses and the human communication it embodies.
• This influence has grown with the configuration and transformation of the planet’s cultural structures in the recent decades of globalization and of a luckily inevitable biological and cultural crossbreeding, as fortunately there is no art without crossbreeding and music is the paradigm of crossbreeding: the incoercible fate of Humanity.
• Transcribed on ruled paper or in recordings and “agrapha” or auditorily transmitted, from prehistoric cylinders of wax or tin, stone, slate or vinyl disks and magnetic tapes up to the most modern, advanced recording and reproduction techniques, its recovery is a challenge and a necessity.
• An imperative necessity for the historical, social and cultural restoration of the Romany/Gypsy People, the recovery, recognition, valuation and incorporation of Gypsy and Gypsy-inspired music into the common European Cultural Heritage is a true added value: a created/contributed fruit that, as evidence of an active and interactive Gypsy presence, bears witness to and conveys the collective dignity of a born European people, a transnational community with a multi-state base and rooted in time, without which the history of Europe cannot be understood.
• An added value because music, as the most abstract and universal “language”, is a useful art for all the other arts: the best tool for human communication, coexistence and harmony that our species has invented. Its essential harmony is most likely, together with the plastic arts, the most fertile, versatile setting for human cohesion and understanding.
— The idea is to contribute to the common European Cultural Heritage that significant part of universal culture in which the Romany/Gypsy element is the inspiration, basis, key motive or mortar of an authentic melting pot of music of all origins and latitudes, fused or combined, gathered, summarized and projected by true geniuses of composition and interpretation who have invented traditions or begun avant-garde schools, maintained and passed on to the present by musicians young and old who sum up the past and usher in the future.
• The universal prestige attained by Gypsy musicians – based on the empathy, non-violence and creativity that characterize the misunderstood and even less recognized secular Romany culture – has made its very rich diversity an indispensable reference in the musical panorama in all countries. For the purpose of this project, it suffices to recall, by way of example, many of those who knew how to capture the singularities of timbres, colors, styles and forms of creative inspiration: Haydn, Liszt, Borodin, Brahms, Falla, Albéniz, Turina, Granados, Verdi, Dvorák, Bartók, Glinka, Janácek, Kodály, Sarasate, Rimsky-Korsakof, Lalo, Mussorgsky, Debussy, Ravel, ..., Menuhin, Reinhardt, Kocani Orkestar, Taraf de Haïdouk, Bregovic, Yukanov, Kalyi Jag, Antal Szalai, Paco de Lucía, Caracol, los Mairena, Camarón, ...
— The idea is to develop a three-year investigative research project (musicology and historiographic, bibliographic, journalistic, sociological and intercultural documentation) to rediscover and retrieve compositions, composers and individual and collective performers from all epochs.
• A careful selection of whatever is retrieved, based on rigorous quality criteria, will socialize these musical products as exactly what they are: common goods of the common European Cultural Heritage, “a living, profound unit of a common legacy based on complementary, shared and sharable spiritual and cultural values".
— In short, the Project is intended to efficiently, effectively, assuredly and properly conserve, safeguard and transmit this musical heritage in visitable databases set up and articulated with flexibility and solidity and continually open and accessible to the interactive, ongoing visits of an unlimited number of users in Websites in each country and in the mirrors of co-organizing and partner entities, constituted and coordinated ad hoc in the net by means of a planned, systematic application of innovative techniques and resources of compilation, recording, processing, classification, coding, reproduction and broadcasting with the most advanced technologies. The transnational unification and coordination of teams, processes, standards, methods and programs, work and exchange protocols and conceptual and thematic thesauruses will permit the free availability, retrieval and downloading of contents by educational and cultural centers, conservatories, archives and libraries, orchestras, composers, performers, researchers, experts, students, fans, etc. |
