In Vranje, minority Roma monopolize the performance of brass band music, maintaining the musical repertoires that are central to life-cycle celebrations and community life. Locals value Romani musicians as affective laborers whose practices are supposed to produce heightened emotional and social engrossment in the celebration. Yet celebrants’ pleasure also comes through public displays of status. While Roma enjoy a measure of constrained agency, the links between affect, pleasure, and power plays mean that Romani musical labor in Vranje often entails viscerally reproducing their inequality vis-à-vis Serb patrons.
