This time, 'EUROPEAN MEETINGS IN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY' (the yearbook of Romania's 
ICTM National Committee) opens with a provoking and daring
proposition: scholars to overtly speak up about one of the most cunning,
subordinated, hypocritical, obedient, undermining and enduring kinds of 
political involvement of the ethnomusicological scholarship, which is the 
one related to the Hungarian-Romanian conflicting interests and politics 
over Transylvania. The section is titled "Transylvania: Music, Ethnicities, 
Discord," and gathers the contributions of eight authors of different 
theoretical and ideological backgrounds.

As a Romanian born in Transylvania, I met more often than not rumors and
gossips both among commoners and intellectuals relative to the divergent
political ideas and attitudes among Romanians and Hungarians. Yet, as most 
of both Hungarians and Romanians there, myself I was part in the choir of 
naive people of good faith, trusting the human values and the fruits of a 
long lasting politics of "brotherhood among different cohabiting nations". 
Only after I studied closer the shameful tragedy of Yugoslavian wars—which 
represented the failure of such politics at its best—I realized that the 
Transylvania issue, as it is differently represented in the imagination of 
Hungarians and Romanians, is similar to many of the Yugoslavian complexes 
that led to war. This made me to discard the "law" of academic silence on 
the subject of Transylvanian musical multinationalism, and to call my 
colleagues ethnomusicologists for an overt discussion. Thus, in 2000 I wrote 
an article (Musics and Musicologies of the "Hungarian-Romanian Conflict") 
and distributed it very widely, and then put it to open this year's issue of 
the 'European Meetings in Ethnomusicology'. Lynn Hooker (Transylvania and 
the
Politics of the Musical Imagination) and Craig Packard (A Research Agenda 
for Studying the Hungarian-Romanian Ethnomusicological Conflict: Visits by 
the Ethnic Police to North America) contributed to this topic with objective 
distance and sensitive awareness, the former with historical and 
contemporary examples, the latter with theoretical and practical 
suggestions. Laszlo Kurti (Ethnomusicology, Folk Tradition and
Responsibility: Romanian-Hungarian Intellectual Perspectives) went deeper 
into particular details. Whereas Zoltan Szalayi (Interethnical Conflict? 
Reflections on the Problems Deriving from the Vast Common Cultural 
Repertoire of the Cohabiting Ethnic Peoples in Transylvania) and Zamfir 
Dejeu (Cultural Connections within Traditional Music and Dance in 
Transylvania) both illustrated the divide between Hungarian and Romanian 
scholars and the type of political commitment we, all the other 
contributors, were identifying as one-sided and politically dangerous. 
Szalay shows how a Romanian author offers Hungarian folk music as Romanian, 
whereas the same Romanian author demonstrates how Hungarian folk music 
collectors take, label and promote Romanian pieces as Hungarian. Both of 
them speak on behalf of the same "science", both are anatagonic; and 
therefore the reader should see once more how serious is the competition in 
the "contest" of demonstrating the Hungarianness and, respectively, the 
Romanianness of folk musics in Transylvania. In the end, Alana Hunt and 
Sophia Chapman (musicians from Australia) replied with vehemence against my 
suggestion that they could innocently play and take sides in the ongoing 
conflicting ideologies.

The second section of the volume is dedicated to Poland ("Poland: Music,
Lyrics, Nation"), which was celebrated in a symposium that took part in
April 2001 at the University of Chicago. Philip Bohlman (The Place of
Displacement – Polish Musics at Home and Beyond), Katarzyna Grochowska
(Wacław of Szamotuły, the Jewel of the Polish Renaissance: Indigenous or
Imported?), Daniel Barolsky (Performing Polishness: The Interpretation of 
Identity), Jeffers Engelhardt (Asceticism and the Nation: Henryk Górecki, 
Krzysztof Penderecki, and Late Twentieth-Century Poland), Timothy Cooley 
(Migration, Tourism, and Globalization of Polish Tatra Mountain 
Music-Culture), Joshua Pilzer ("Inwazja Waranów": Apocalypse and Social 
Critique in Polish Rock), and Maja Trochimczyk (Passion, Mourning, and the 
Black Angels: Ewa Demarczyk as the Voice of the Nation) sign consistent 
articles, which cover historic as well as contemporary aspects of 
traditional music cultures from Poland and Polish diaspora.

I titled my announcement here in a provocative way bearing in mind the same 
idea I had when intending to help Hungarian and Romanian ethnomusicologists 
to "solve" the backlog of problems accumulated in the long run of divorce 
and of ideological competition. Soft words are always ignored, and the 
subjects discussed are too serious to still be ignored. Historical, 
nationalist ideologies and faithfulness, naturally and uncritically 
inherited, failed. If we keep postponing their dismissal, they will keep 
hinder our advancement. As with the case of the Romanian-Hungarian political 
relationships reflected in the regional folk music collection, promotion, 
and ethnomusicology—they are indeed the undermining, always tickling bomb.

Marin Marian Balasa
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