A detailed investigation, based on extensive study of press reports and early recordings, of the popular Hungarian bands in Vienna who influenced Brahms and other composers.


It has long been recognized that Viennese composers, especially Brahms, were profoundly influenced by Hungarian "Gypsy bands." Furthermore, the style hongrois repertory and style in which these bands specialized has been identified as important in its own right. The bands themselves, however, are generally relegated to the status of being part of an unknowable oral tradition, of which nothing remains apart from some highly exoticized literary hyperbole.
Jon Banks's pathbreaking Hungarian "Gypsy-Band" Music in Vienna, 1850-1914 redresses this imbalance by presenting a detailed account of these "other" musicians and their interactions with the mainstream of Western classical music. To do so, it analyzes thousands of advertisements, news reports, and anecdotes in the Viennese press relating to "Gypsy bands" (whose members were often but not always Romani) and builds a detailed picture of who the musicians were, where they played, and how the conditions of their employment affected their lives and their music-making. The press notices are collated with evidence from contemporaneous Hungarian sources as well as an analysis of the hundreds of recordings that these bands made in the first decade of the twentieth century.
In undertaking this first systematic examination of these different kinds of materials, Jon Banks's book provides a reanimation of some extraordinary personalities and careers in the light of their own achievements as well as their influence on others.