Energetic and lively pieces to appeal to students who like fast and sparkling music. The selections are from such masters as Bach, Beethoven, Haydn and Bartok. All pieces are in their original form. Early intermediate to intermediate.

It's 1937, the eve of World War II. At twenty-six years old, Rezsi Lehrer leaves Munkacs, a small charming city located deep within a remote corner of the Carpathian mountains and travels alone to the United States. War breaks out and Eastern European borders are sealed. Rezsi's family is trapped in Czechoslovakia and the packages she sends home are returned unopened. When the war ends, Rezsi discovers her parents, two brothers and scores of relatives perished in the Holocaust. Gypsy Music Street is the story of one woman's endless sorrow and guilt she suffers at the loss of her family, the family she left behind "to die alone." Yet she still yearns to return to her town, "the little Paris of the East," to see it just one more time. But after the war, countries borders are redrawn and Mukacevo is no longer located in Czechoslovakia. It becomes completely closed off within the iron grip of the Soviet Union and the political climate is one of Cold War. Mukacevo is off limits for travel. As the years pass, Rezsi reminisces, sharing her longing and grief about the past with her daughter Bobbie. And when she dies an old woman, her dream unfulfilled, Bobbie is driven by her own loss and grief to make this journey home for her mother, and for herself. Adventures in Budapest, Ukraine and Israel make Gypsy Music Street an enthralling memoir of love and loss. Yet, it is also a story of the overwhelming joy a daughter experiences when she travels back in time and discovers her own torn roots.

Gypsies have for centuries been simultaneously vilified and romanticized—associated with criminality and dirt, but at the same time with color, magic, and music. Gypsy music is popular around the world and often performed with gusto at major events, including at weddings in Bulgaria, jazz bars in Paris, and festivals in the United States. In Gypsy Music, Alan Ashton-Smith explores why this music has such wide appeal, surveying the varied styles that are considered to be gypsy music and asking what links them together. The book begins in the Balkans, home to the world’s largest Romani populations and a major site of gypsy music production. But just as the traditionally nomadic Roma have traveled globally, so has their music. Gypsy music styles have roots and associations outside of the Balkans, including Russian Romani guitar music, flamenco and gypsy jazz, and the more recent forms of gypsy punk and Balkan beats. Covering the thirteenth century to the present day, and with a geographical scope that ranges from rural Romania to New York by way of Budapest, Moscow, and Andalusia, Gypsy Music reveals the remarkable diversity of this exuberant art form.

A formidable challenge to the study of Roma (Gypsy) music is the muddle of fact and fiction in determining identity. This book investigates "Gypsy music" as a marked and marketable exotic substance, and as a site of active cultural negotiation and appropriation between the real Roma and the idealized Gypsies of the Western imagination. David Malvinni studies specific composers-including Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Janacek, and Bartók-whose work takes up contested and varied configurations of Gypsy music. The music of these composers is considered alongside contemporary debates over popular music and film, as Malvinni argues that Gypsiness remains impervious to empirical revelations about the "real" Roma.

Translated from the Polish, Anna G. PiotrowskaÕs Gypsy Music in European Culture details the profound impact that Gypsy music has had on European culture from a broadly historical perspective. The author explores the stimulating influence that Gypsy music had on a variety of European musical forms, including opera, vaudeville, ballet, and vocal and instrumental compositions. The author analyzes the use of Gypsy themes and idioms in the music of recognized giants such as Bizet, Strauss, and Paderewski, detailing the composersÕ use of scale, form, motivic presentations, and rhythmic tendencies, and also discusses the impact of Gypsy music on emerging national musical forms.

Recounts a Balkan odyssey in search of the secret history and culture of Europe's greatest musicians - the Roma Gypsies

Presented here is a rare collection of some of the best Gypsy folk songs popular among the Romanies of Russia and Eastern Europe. All offered in the original Romany tribal dialect, as appropriate to each song, with easy-to-follow pronunciation guide specially formulated for the native English speaker and literal (word-for-word) English translation. the appended short historical and linguistic overview offers a rare insight into the history, traditions, language as well as the music and songs of this unique and mysterious people. Great addition to any pianist's collection!

Written by a group of dedicated flamenco enthusiasts, this book traces the history and development of the art of flamenco, that proud, soulful, stirring folk music and dance created by the gypsies of the Andalusian region of Spain in the 19th century. The essays examine the musical, artistic, and spiritual aspects of flamenco as well as its social context and history. The great performers both past and present are identified and discussed.