After-notes to
The Dance at Mociu
(Notes to the book The Dance at Mociu, prose sketches of Transylvania and adjacent zones, published by Shearsman in 2003.)
1. THINGS CHANGE
The scaffolding is removed from the Endless Column. The ‘historic centres’ of towns like Brasov and Sibiu are getting considerably smartened up for visitors, though as in most other poor countries the gleam and shine ends abruptly when you step into the living areas; Havana was dramatically thus. In the countryside more cars appear in the roads, though the horse-drawn carts are still around, still with red tassels, now equipped with licence plates and (supposedly) red lights at the back at night. New lorry routes are blazed through villages (see Preface) covering everyone with dust from time to time (see Sunday Evening in Botiza) and confusing the street lay-out of lower Budesti so that I can’t locate the ‘oldest house’ any more. Quite possibly it no longer exists. Half the ‘hotels’ we stayed in no longer exist. Most of them seemed very dubious institutions, staffed entirely by young women who appeared startled at encountering bone fide travellers. The website World-Wide Directory of Orthodox Monasteries lists Arnota as a ‘Nuns’ Monastery’, in which case they were well hidden. One of the website addresses given to view pictures of Arnota produces a page saying, ‘WARNING: There is jack shit on this page.’ At Ocna Sugatag there is a gypsy encampment by the lake below the town, busy with metalwork over a fire. The spectre of enormous bureaucratic intervention hovers over the entire land.
Following again the walk from Glod to Poienile Izei in 2006, nobody notices us. No one stops work and asks where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Foreigners are becoming commonplace. There’s a scatter of Pensiuni in the village. The hospitality remains manifest and sincere but organised. The food is wonderful in daunting quantities (‘Yes we always have mutton stew for breakfast’) and you’ll be shown plenty and told plenty but you won’t be asked much. People with the right key in their pockets seem not to happen to turn up so readily just when they’re needed. The Borsa ski complex has expanded enormously and looks like a small town scattered over the hillside. I don’t know what goes on there. Unchi has died. When I ask about the ‘poor couple’ in Hoteni I’m told that nothing has changed.
The woman at the water-mill is as gloomy as ever and says it won’t go on for much longer. The shop-café-bar at Desesti has a half-built terrasse outside it (you no longer sit among sacks of nails) and a ‘museum’ next door which like most of the small museums in villages is an undisguised shop selling hand-woven textiles. A man at a house just along the road from the parents’ farm in Hoteni when asked about the pots festooning his house, including a tree, says they don’t mean anything in particular, it’s just the way we’ve always done it. The Soporul de Câmpie musicians are still in the States, after all this time. I hope at least they are still playing there, though there is no evidence of it (activities of Hungarian traditional musicians in American can easily be traced on the web). In 1997 they took part in a Smithsonian Festival. They were one of the best string bands in Transylvania and had a huge repertoire. Romania joins ‘Europe’ and is heavily suspected of providing illegal prison facilities for victims of the U.S.A.’s ‘War on Terror’. A film called Transylvania appears at the local cinema. It has about 5 minutes of the genuine Szászcsávás band playing in an absurd situation in the middle of a snow field, with a small speaking part for Csángálo. I hope they got well paid. The rest of the film is nauseating pit-tourism (that is, tourism of the pits, by the pits).
Mr Blair announces that Romanians and Bulgarians are both very welcome to Britain, as long as they stay away. Romanians declare that they have better places to go to. People in the countryside express apprehension and occasionally hope. In Csávás a travel-guide from Bucharest shakes his head and says, ‘They can’t go on like this. They’ll have to collectivise.’ Collectivise!? Again!? In Maramures they successfully resisted collectivisation under 50 years of Communist rule. An old man who runs a small neighbourhood bar in Vadu Izei fears that he will be forced to close down because the veranda over the meadows where most of his customers sit to drink is built entirely of wood which he thinks is against EU regulations. The Romanian Embassy in London refuses to include The Dance at Mociu in its regular bulletin listing all new books on Romania in English.
2. EFTA BOTOCA
Further information acquired about Efta Botoca shows that he was a better-known musician in Romania in his day than I had assumed. Indeed there is a street named after him in Timisoara. He was born near there, in Jebel, in 1925, later moving to Bucuresti in the 1950s, and he died some time in the 1990s. So he was a musician of the Banat. I’ve also obtained two more cassettes of him, all three originating, I think, in LP records of the 1980s from the state label, Electrecord. I’ve not found him recording at any other period, though he is said to have played and recorded with all the major figures of the music scene. So he was obviously a working musician in Bucuresti, not in the gypsy ‘lautari’ scene but in the more-or-less distinct popular-traditional zone with people like Gheorghe Zamfir, Dumitru Farcas and Maria Lataretu and all the state-sponsored ensembles. He was in Paraschiv Oprea’s orchestra but when he appears as soloist on one track of their CD ‘Romanian Folklore Treasures’ the orchestra has vanished and we are again with a trio of violin viola and bass. Exactly the same thing happens on his one featured track in the CD of Nicolae Sabau’s orchestra. This must have been his normal or preferred working unit, and how he managed that through the era of state massification of the music I don’t know. Both of these tracks are repeated from his own LPs and I get the impression of a musician with, for a traditional artist, a small repertoire which was carefully studied, like The Voice Squad. He is referred to on Tom Pixton’s website as ‘a scholarly representative of traditional Transylvanian violin playing,’ presumably in error for ‘Romanian’. I don’t know what his scholarship was.
Everything I’ve heard of his has the same minimal accompaniment of kontra and bass (I think the one I copied in Hoteni did have a bass playing, somewhat blotted out in the copying) which is the most noticeable immediate distinction of Botoca among all the other trained local musicians who fronted ensembles in the Communist period (and there were hundreds of them), and the style is very much the same as in the one I originally found in Hoteni.
There’s a photograph of him on one cassette booklet and another on the web, both obviously taken on the same occasion, not in a straw hat, but in mildly traditional dress, white smock with wide red striped belt, standing playing the violin in front of a house wall, vaguely rural but could be anywhere. Receding hair discloses a big domed forehead, large pair of glasses, rather thick lips in a somewhat furrowed face, focused down towards the bow on the string. There’s no singing on any of his recordings; he just plays the violin, steadily, in that gentle, fluid, rich way which he seems to have invented, with always the same minimal accompaniment. Steadily focused. In a sense he destroys all the village music he plays, completely stripping it of sense of occasion and projection towards an active participant, but at the same time remakes it. Not what it was, but not a corpse. Something between a ghost and a statue.
In 2006 we encountered (in a pensiune in the middle of the wood-yard at Vadu Izei) a Romanian television channel which transmits nothing but ‘folk’ or muzica populara. Rural fantasy scenarios. One after the other, by the hundred, singers with their troupes stand in front of the camera in full traditional dress, smiling sweetly, swaying slightly, with a backdrop usually of a pretty rural house front, delivering destroyed village music. Usually they have three or four young children in front of them, sweetly smiling and swaying, sometimes the children sing. Very little variation on this tableau. Sometimes an electric keyboard, guitar and bass in a hay-field. There was one older woman who sang a doina well, with mild ornamentation, in the same context. Nothing else ever happens on this channel. I don’t know who it’s for, the rural population itself, pretending that’s where it lives, or the urban population remembering where they never came from. At the bottom of the screen is a strip, and if you telephone the company, you can, for a fee, put a message into this strip for someone who you know will be watching the programme. It didn’t seem to be used much, but now and then a message would float past. Beryl translated one of them as, ‘Thank you for the cake, mother.’
Nothing could be further from this than Efta Botoca, which is curious because he has, as I said, taken the village music and made it into something else and something milder just as all the TV rose-cottage Draculas have, even into something you could call ‘sweet’. There is some essential difference. I think it is to do with retention of energy, or even passion, in a displaced theatre. There is another musician like this, discovered by chance in 2006 by walking into a music shop in Vadu Izei and buying a CD because it looked vaguely likely to be interesting (the music shops, like the bars, seem to migrate monthly and usually share one proprietor or assistant with at least one other shop or business in the town so that they’re closed at least half the time). A singer and flute player from the Lapus region called Grigore Lese. He has an ethnic line in preserved music, solo, and as representative of Romanian ‘spiritual’ authenticity, and he is also a professional bassoonist, but what he actually excels in is lyrical songs arranged with small band accompaniment, of an exquisite melancholy cast. As far as I know that’s on just one of his three CDs. A very strong, controlled voice, in the big-voiced northern tradition, beautifully inflected. Again a sweetness, a sad one, but out of the strongest and most energetic realisation of fading.
But I don’t think either of these could attain the vigorous splendour and depth of Ioan Pop’s music, which sacrifices nothing of its condition. In August 2006, in that same room in the wooden house in Hoteni, Popic showed us a video of his group, ‘Iza’, performing as on-stage music for a production of Elektra, a Romanian version after Sophocles and Euripides, by the State Theatre Company of Oradea. There were three violins including ‘Diavolul’, and Popic, with Geta and Voichita singing. Sombrely dressed in town hats and long dark coats, the group intervened here and there in pauses in the action or accompanied certain dumb-shows, but did exactly what it normally did: Maramures music, songs and dances. The songs were specially chosen but unchanged, still bearing their traditional texts intact. And the match was perfect, it seemed as if the music had been waiting since 1914 for this realisation of its inhering depth. It wasn’t just that the musicians rose to the occasion so admirably, it was mainly that the material they brought with them belonged there, in a Greek tragedy. Some items had had a ‘ritual’ function (wedding and funeral) with may have helped, but it was the whole sphere of the music which was suddenly dramatic and even ‘tragic’. And most of the songs were lively or lilting, but a kind of grim perseverance became evident in this context, within this liveliness, and on the track list is a song, musically quite animated, with lyrics beginning, ‘Let the fire burn you, bitter world!...’ (‘We always sing this one at parties’)...
No need to speculate on the obvious, concerning the long ‘peasant’ histories trailing behind this music as they or similar trail behind Sophocles. Continuity itself is the only important factor, a route out of peasantry in both cases, or at least onto its border. Tragedies which I view as acts of lyrical expiation against Greece’s development of a ruthlessly exploitative military society and the invention of urban misogyny (both honours shared with Imperial China of course). A music which asserts long-standing resistance to and subjection under, empires, nations and businesses. Revenge and the perpetuation of harm are not peasant subjects, but resistance and fate are.
And at the beginning of Sophocles’ version Electra appears at dawn and sings lines such as ‘My bitter tears shall never end’, and ‘My way is the way of the tearful bird’ and ‘...I have no child, no lover / I carry my never-ending burden, / Washed in my tears’ [translation of E.F. Watling]. These are familiar tropes in Transylvanian lamenting songs. Electra will never stop being sorrowful: she will either disappear when the act is done or continue to lament succeeding sorrows. She is masked, she wears the mask of anger and despair which she cannot take off, just as she can never marry, for her name means ‘the unwedded’, another ‘peasant’ disaster. Greek fatalism is heavy with guilt, but the chorus, the circular dance, the hora, brings a relentless music of unchanging burden up through Macedonia to Transylvania, or across central Asia with the Magyars, which resides insolubly in the most energetic dance or the sweetest love-song. The burden is worn not exactly lightly, but like a ceremonial robe.
[Most of this note extracted from the ‘Additional notes’ section of Dawn Songs.]
3. A MISTAKE CORRECTED AND INFORMATION AMPLIFIED
There is a mistake at the end of Gypsy Neighbours: ‘the camel’s eye’. What I meant to write was the Biblical term for the small door inserted into a large gate, which is ‘the eye of the needle’ (a rich man shall enter Heaven as easily as a camel through it).
The Mociu band (note on p.119) came to light when it emerged during the 2005 Kentauro tour that they had engaged the band to play for them at a restaurant near Mociu the previous year. The leader was indeed a left-handed violinist. The band were selling a home-made CDr of themselves and three magnificent tracks of a 5-piece band were included in Wim Bosmans’ CD compilation from the tour. Then I discovered that a couple of wandering Americans who call themselves ‘Lost Trails’ had recorded the band as a 3-piece in 2000 and issued a CD of them as ‘Stingaciu [left-handed] Band’ [Lost Trails 01, 2001]. The band now plays regularly for touring groups in the season, which is not a lot of work, and I doubt if there is much more available as, being Romanian-speakers they have not been ‘adopted’ by Budapest. (Though Budapest can create ‘Hungarian’ gypsy bands out of Romanian ones when it wants to: the Magyarpalatka band, one of their favourites, comes from a village with a split population and the musicians themselves speak Romanian. When they work in Budapest, which they often do, they need an interpreter.) The musicians of the Mociu band are Carol Tuli ‘Stingaciu’ (violin), Babut Covaci (viola) and Cornel Bumb (bass), with or without Remus Borzasi (violin), Carol Covaci (viola). Covaci is a very common name for gypsy musicians right across Transylvania and must be a remnant of a caste system. It is ‘Diavolul’s surname.