The album Balkanology, by Ivo Papasov and his Orchestra, came out in 1991 at the historical moment of the fall of state socialism in Bulgaria. Papasov, the virtuoso clarinetist and his band Trakiya have been the best-known and most successful representatives of a storied genre called wedding music. The choice of the name Balkanology by the album's British record producer, Joe Boyd, was inspired by Charlie Parker's ‘Ornithology’ (let's recall that Parker‘s nickname was ‘Bird’), and is a reference to the fact that the phenomenally talented and equally popular Trakiya stands not merely for its home country but the multi-ethnic Balkans. Moreover, the name connotes ‘science’, more specifically, the brilliance and creativity attributed to the group's four Turkish-speaking Romani members. Silverman, who has published extensively on the region's Romani music culture, has been not only a long-term ethnographer but also a fellow musician, an advocate, and a promoter of the group, who has worked to connect Bulgarian Roma with their Macedonian counterparts in New York.

The book addresses puzzling questions, especially for those less familiar with the music of the Balkans and the central role and dismal status of Roma in it. Some of these questions include: why would any government care to monitor the kind of music performed at a wedding party? Why and how does music played by Roma become so charged as to appear as the polluter and, decades later, the very guardian of authentic Bulgarian folk? Balkanology offers nuanced answers to these and other questions. Relating her personal encounter with wedding music over 40 years earlier, Silverman's opening chapter immediately pulls the reader in by describing its complex and heavily politicised story. This is, then, elaborated in the second, and largest, chapter dedicated to the predicament of wedding music in state socialism, which is replete with paradoxes and even absurdities. Despite its status as instrumental entertainment music played for a multi-generational audience, wedding music initially occupied a countercultural space in Bulgaria's musical world. Its most passionate fans were young people. It became a highly sought form of entertainment in response to the genre's attempted erasure by officialdom for being ‘foreign’. The genre's legitimacy was questioned on the grounds of being simultaneously ‘too eastern’ and ‘too western’. In state socialist Bulgaria (1946–91), the Turkish and Roma minorities suffered many forms of oppression and discrimination including, most notoriously, the forced Bulgarianisation of their names. Wedding music's difference from ‘pure’ Bulgarian folk music spurred the Communist Party to fine and jail its practitioners, ban its signature instruments (accordion, clarinet) from music education and implement harsh measures to discourage music students from attending events where the music was performed. Over the years, though, wedding music's massive popularity and profitability led the government to take a more accommodating stance. Silverman draws on Michael Herzfeld's concept of ‘cultural intimacy’ to explain the inconsistencies within and across state-run institutions, whose members were far from immune to the frenzy surrounding the genre and its idols. Increasingly, the media industry figured how to skim profits from wedding music's burgeoning black market: first, by producing and selling sanitised renditions of the music and, second, by marketing the recordings at a price set far above those in other genres.

Nonetheless, wedding music thrived during these aggravating circumstances. Fans crossed the country to hear their favourite musicians since weddings were huge events hosting hundreds of uninvited guests as well. Many fans were willing to pay the equivalent of a month's salary for Ivo Papazov's and his fellow musicians’ bootleg recordings. Not coincidentally, Balkanology, the album, was released two years after the fall of state socialism. It represented the music in its full vitality at a time when previous obstacles to Trakiya's tours abroad had been lifted and the band was ‘awash in media adoration’ from continental Europe to London and New York. In Chapter 3, Silverman depicts the twists and turns leading to the production of the band's first uncensored album and provides a detailed textual analysis of each track. Chapter 4 recounts why wedding music, instead of flourishing in a politically liberated society, became the victim of a typical postsocialist scenario characterised by privatised and mismanaged enterprises, the waning buying power of ordinary people, emigration, the prevalence of mafias and corruption, unemployment and increasing racial animosity towards Roma. The crucial institutions of the music business (old and new recording companies and folk festivals) also suffered, while a more lurid and pop-influenced genre, chalga, lured young people away from wedding music. The latter's growing international success, however, brought Trakiya a measure of official recognition at home as well. Silverman points out that this belated recognition did not rest on an ethnically more inclusive and modernising approach to folk. Instead, wedding music began to appeal to nationalists as ‘authentic’ Bulgarian music because it favourably compared with the blatantly multi-ethnic and massively commercial chalga. Chapter 5 discusses the contradictions involved in the renewed, official and popular, interest in the wedding music in the context of the persistent oppression of Roma and the strategies adopted by Trakiya and other groups to remain relevant in the contemporary popular music scene.

It is beyond the scope of a short book like Balkanology to delve into issues like the embeddedness of wedding music in Bulgaria's youth musical landscape. Yet the reader may identify an intriguing parallel between the Cold War-era predicament of wedding music and that of rock in Eastern Europe during that era. Their shared countercultural status begs several questions. Which had a more powerful grip on the minds and wallets of Bulgarian youths? Could wedding music's rise in the 1970s be viewed as a unique outgrowth of the international folk revival movement? Thanks to Silverman's richly textured and fascinating account of the genre through its most successful album, one may expect that many more questions will emerge not merely among students of Eastern Europe's popular music, but also among those concerned with ethnic and youth cultures, popular music genres and the broader question of music's nexus with social change.