Balkan Brass Band

Balkan brass band music is the virtuoso brass tradition of the Balkan peninsula, above all of Romani communities in Serbia, North Macedonia and Romania, descended from Ottoman military bands (mehter) absorbed into village festivity in the nineteenth century. Ensembles of trumpets, flugelhorns, tenor horns, tubas and percussion (tapan or snare and bass drum) play fast, ornamented dance music in asymmetric meters, with soloists competing in speed and invention. Bands are the sound of weddings, saint's-day feasts (slavas) and funerals across the region, and since the 1990s groups such as *Fanfare Ciocărlia* and the *Boban Marković Orkestar* have carried the repertory to world stages.