World Music, Creative Reinterpretation, and the East Moldavian Roma Tradition

This study explores creative engagement with the East Moldavian Roma music tradition as a reflexive process that expands and enriches personal performance practice. It examines how a hermeneutic approach to understanding and reinterpreting the EMR musical tradition may be fed into one’s own performances, improvisations, and compositions, and how this engagement might be contextualized within an over-arching concept of World Music. Moreover, the study considers what transcription and analysis strategies might be employed in the service of this creative reinterpretation, and the strengths and weaknesses of such strategies. Ultimately, the research illustrates an insider’s account of becoming part of the current World Music scene through a process of reinterpretation that leads to new ways of being in the world. This is a process that captures the notion of a ‘changing self’, a metamorphosis of the self and the music one performs.