Shame on you, Cultural Appropriation! Rethinking Dvořák’s ‘Gypsy Songs, Op. 55

This paper investigates the portrayal of Romani, “gypsy,” people in Western music, with Antonín Dvořák’s song cycle “Gypsy Songs, Op. 55” as a central case study. It explores the view of cultural appropriation as cultural borrowing, examining how this concept intersects with musical exoticism and orientalism, and how these musical traits shaped Dvořák’s portrayal of Bohemian Romani culture. Drawing on historical and socio-musical methodologies, the study analyzes the Bohemian Romani and Hungarian influences in Dvořák’s cycle. It discusses the ecological impact of the Gypsy Songs within its cultural environment and implications for performance reception. By situating Dvořák’s work within broader debates on authorship, authenticity, and representation, this research contributes to ongoing discourse on the ethics of an inevitable, and not always wrong, cultural borrowing in music. Ultimately, it seeks to reassess how nineteenth-century exoticism informs current perspectives on cultural “cancelation” and the evolving moral standards applied to cross-cultural artistic expression.