FOLK/Music Tony Ballog and the Golden Strings, Hungarian Gypsy music

Saturday: 3:30 p.m. Two Rivers, 8:15 p.m. Penobscot; Sunday: 3 p.m. Two Rivers, 5 p.m. Heritage

Tony Ballog and his ensemble carry on the vibrant, centuries-old tradition of the Hungarian Gypsy musician. Ballog can trace his musical lineage back through at least 10 generations of stringed instrument players in his family. European Gypsies (Roma in their own language) are descendants of people who left northern India in a series of migrations between the eighth and 10th centuries, although Roma also remain in India, particularly in Rajasthan. The Roma moved slowly west in a diaspora throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. They are known to have surfaced in Hungary by 1383, although quite possibly they arrived long before that.

As a persecuted minority nearly everywhere they traveled or settled, the Gypsies were segregated physically and professionally by non-Roma. The role of musician was one of the few occupations open to them in many countries.

In Hungary, Gypsy musicians are credited not only with keeping their own traditional folk music alive, but also with performing and popularizing the compositions of non-Gypsy Hungarian composers. In their role as professional performers, it was the job of the Gypsy musicians to develop a repertoire of traditional and popular styles wide enough to satisfy all listeners.

To a great extent, the music of Eastern Europe is Gypsy either in origin, or transmission, or both. As Eastern Europeans came to America, it was often Gypsy musicians who provided sounds of the Old World here as well, performing as ensembles at celebrations and as entertainers at restaurants serving the community.

Tony Ballog was born in the late 1950s into a family of traditional Hungarian Gypsy musicians in Cleveland, home to the largest concentration of Hungarians outside of Hungary. He began to study the violin at age 6 or 7, sitting in the kitchen with his father, Albert, a talented string player, and repeating by ear the melodies that his father would play for him. Other tunes came through a slightly more circuitous route, as cousins in the other half of the two-unit house practiced songs over and over on the piano. “I learned those tunes just as well as they did,” Ballog recalls.

Ballog subsequently has studied classical technique at college and with noted concertmasters, and has performed as a symphony violinist, but the heart of his repertoire remains the traditional tunes learned from his family and other Gypsy performers.

Like many professional Roma musicians, he has lived and worked in communities where concentrations of people of Eastern European descent still provide a demand for skilled players, including Michigan and Chicago as well as Cleveland. For the past year, he has lived in Florida, where he continues to play Eastern European folk music for parties, as well as filling the traditional role of restaurant performer of folk and popular styles at fine establishments such as Palm Beach’s The Breakers.

In Bangor, Ballog brings together an ensemble of musicians to focus on the more traditional elements of his repertoire. These notas, or songs, include the three most typical Hungarian Gypsy styles: the csardas, a medium-tempo dance like a two-step; the friss csardas, a fast dance step; and the halgato, a melancholic song of no fixed rhythm in which the violinist and accompanists interact like jazz musicians.

Other folk styles the group regularly performs include tangolike rhythms and the marching cadences of the verbunko.

Among the musicians featured in Ballog’s ensemble is the noted cimbalom player George Lakatos. The cimbalom, the musical precursor to the hammered dulcimer, has up to 35 strings and boasts a musical range equivalent to the piano. George Lakatos has performed Hungarian Gypsy music around the world with noted Hungarian bandleaders such as Robby Lakatos. He now lives in Florida and brings his masterful musicianship to audiences around the United States.