THE SLIM WOODEN MALLETS BOUNCE across the strings of the cymbalom, the bass player pulls a low tone out of the smallish instrument hanging from a strap over his shoulder. Short chords limp from the three-stringed bratsch in a rhythm that seems to say “left leg long, right leg short.” As the fiddler plays his trills—hardly a note without trills—the groom walks through the streets of his village, Brincovenesti, in the Mures region of Romania, to the home of his lover. He is followed by dozens of family members and friends in a rolling marching party, the Roma band behind them playing constantly, turning every step into a dance, every word into a song. As the men amble to the irregular rhythm of the band, onlookers receive sweets, share a glass of whiskey.

Upon arrival at the home of his bride, the groom delivers a bottle of fine champagne to her father as a symbolic gesture in order to enter the house. The band standing outside with the growing crowd picks up the tempo. As the women sway, feet hardly moving while swinging their hips as belly dancers might, the men match the fiendish pace of the fiddler’s fingers with their wild dance. It is morning and the start of a wedding that will last until the sun rises the next day. The figure of the Gypsy fiddler has stirred violin virtuosos and composers for hundreds of years. His charisma, deep tone, weeping glissandos, and hair-raising speed inspired such pieces as Haydn’s Gypsy Rondo, Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, and Ravel’s Tzigane (see music by clicking on the PDF, below).

The name Gypsy has its origin in the mistaken assumption that persisted until the end of the 19th century that this culture came to Europe from Egypt. In fact, the language of the Gypsies, Romany, is closely related to Sanskrit, which places the origin of the culture in northern India and dates the beginning of its diaspora at around 1000 AD. Gypsies call themselves Roma, which means “person” in Romany. Always a minority, the Gypsies influence the cultures around them and are influenced in return. There is no unified religion for example.

In Hungary they are Protestant, in Romania Orthodox, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Lebanon, or Morocco they are Muslim.

Josef Gazsi, born in 1971 in the village of Brincovenesti in the Mures region of Romania, is a Gypsy violinist, the product of a long cultural and family tradition. “Each family has a tradition. It was my luck that my family were musicians on my father’s side. On my mother’s side they were all metal smiths. The tradition continues. My father plays contrabass. My grandfather played cymbalom. His father also played bass.”

Gazsi’s father, also a member of the local symphony orchestra, took young Josef along for the weddings on the weekends. “There was a violinist there who took me aside and showed me how to do it. My first violin lesson was like this. I learned a song which is on my CD. This was the first piece that I learned on the violin. I was four. In one hour he taught me two songs and after he said he doesn’t want to teach me any more. I never forgot these two songs.”

By age nine, Gazsi had already learned many traditional tunes from his father and the other musicians in the band. He enjoyed the atmosphere. “It’s nice. You start at 10 in the morning. You play in front of the groom’s house for about an hour. And then you follow his family through the streets playing all the time to the bride’s house. And after that you go to the church, always playing, even the cymbalom and the bass. They have smaller instruments with a strap over the shoulder. For me it was always fun. You get cookies and stuff.”

Each region has its own sound and style. “Every 10 kilometers there is a different music,” explains Gazsi. “If you play the music from my village at a wedding in another village 50 kilometers away, they will kill you!”

“They have different traditions for weddings, what songs they play, what kind of trills. When you play in another place you hear the difference immediately and you adjust. The song you play depends on the time of day, at what point the wedding is and what is being eaten at the time.

“There’s a lot of food! It starts in the morning with an apero, then soup and meat. In the afternoon you have something else, at midnight again.

“The next morning at around five you have cabbage stuffed with meat and rice. And there is a special music you play for the morning so that the people know it is almost finished, they have to go home.”

A musician must learn to keep a volatile and inebriated wedding party in high spirits, but a musician’s flexibility and skill isn’t always enough to satisfy every wedding. “One time when I was seventeen I played a wedding with my father (I earned a half-month’s salary for one wedding). But you play from Saturday 10 am until Sunday 6 or 7 am. This time in the morning they didn’t let us go home. It was already 9:30. My hands were swollen. You play for dancing all the time. The Gypsy weddings are the worst because you always have to play fast stuff.

“There were 200 crazy drunk people and they said, ‘No, Gypsies, you don’t go home now, you play!’ I was so pissed off! And then suddenly a guy came into the wedding hall drunk like mad with his horse. He sang a melody and told me to play it and said he will now dance with his horse. I stood up and told him ‘I won’t play!’ and I packed up the violin. We had to escape from there. There was an old cymbalom player. The crowd broke the legs off the cymbalom.”