A vocal and instrumental idiom of vernacular music-making recorded in Maramureş, an upland region ceded to Romania from Hungary in 1918. Béla Bartók's documentation of this genre (1923) began during a two-week visit in March 1913. He collected 12 renditions from eight Romanian-language villages (eight vocal examples and four on tilinca, wooden flute) and typologized a tonal ambit as shown in ex.1. Bartók noted tendencies for the third and fourth degrees of the scale to fluctuate in pitch, sometimes flatter, sometimes sharper; the lower fifth degree d' might be no more than a soft anacrusis, what he termed a whispered upbeat to a phrase, or it might figure in a slide down from the final tone g'; he regarded e'' as an appoggiatura confirming the significance of d''. He believed that hora lunga figuration was primarily instrumental and observed that interpretations were subject to the mood of performers and their capacity for momentary invention. Three distinctive sections were perceived: a prolonged c'' or d'' opening formula, as in ex.2, an ornamented middle section and concluding motifs.
‘Long song’ was the local term for intensive personal enunciations distinguished by protracted lines of parlando delivery. Formulaic inventiveness around a skeletal structure, with stabilized cadences terminating recitative on single tones, these were the aspects that captivated Bartók. Unmodulated octosyllabic lines were characterized by non-semantic interjections (e.g. hei, şi, că, măi, dainale) as well as by glottal clucking sounds, choked sobbing effects expressed by women. Examples were performed by one person at a time. Virtuoso flute renditions were compared by Bartók with dramatic extemporizations elsewhere symbolizing stories such as ‘When the shepherd lost/found his sheep.’
In 1934, perusing recordings archived in Bucharest at the Society for Romanian Composers (by Constantin Brăiloiu and colleagues), Bartók encountered florid bel canto idioms from zones of Oltenia, Wallachia, Dobrudja and Moldavia. Delivered in styles specific to their region, these were commonly known as cântec lung or doina. Similar to ‘prolonged melody’ witnessed in Maramureş, their texts treated of amorous sentiments, celebrations of nature, peasant self-assertion or complaint, fugitives from prosecution; or they reflected bitter aspects of life as regrets were shared with birds or flowers, or resigned faith addressed to God to help ease pains of estrangement. Ballad verse doina melody was documented south and east of the Carpathians. In some regions collectors found that doina carried customary wedding, funeral and rainmaking songs.
Recognizing the power of freely rendered declamatory performance, Bartók opined that epic narratives were once delivered by such means. The conjecture was uninformed by long-drawn expressiveness recorded elsewhere, in Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, parts of Macedonia, Greece and Albania. Likewise his journeys in specific Romanian-speaking territories left him unaware that doina-style performance was known in Bucovina, in Năsăud, as well as along the Mureş, Someş and Târnava rivers of Transylvania, and around Sibiu. But learning of structural similarities distinguishing Arabic maqamat variations of the Middle East, and from central Algeria, as well as dramatic laments (dumy) performed by Ukrainians, by 1935 he asserted expansively that hora lunga was a most significant folk music discovery, formerly perhaps a widespread idiom and wholly unlike Hungarian music-making with which he was familiar. Unable to account for its origins, he suggested that Maramureş villagers had learnt the style from contact with others across the Carpathians.
Romanian musicologists such as Alexandru, Cernea, Cocişiu, Comişel, Dinu and Kahane have enlarged the technical focus of Bartók's and Brăiloiu's recordings, ably transcribing the fruits of indigenous 1930s collecting and occasionally drawing attention to similarities perceived in music-making idioms from Turkey, Persia, Tibet and Indochina. Moreover, distinctive Romanian examples from the period between World War I and World War II, culturally appropriated by the communist state in 1948, received idealizing and often biased attention in official publications and sound recordings issued between the 1950s and 80s. Praising regional techniques and coloration once noted in village doina repertories, researchers were subject to political control and were not free to address realistic details of human involvement, especially unwanted dynamics of changing lifestyles and how enforced social levelling impinged on vernacular expression. Static exemplary qualities were evoked suggesting stable rural settlements and harmonious social relations during a period of appropriation of village lands, mass industrialization and violent persecution. Song texts at large were purged of non-Marxist sentiment and religious reference. Documentation supported by staff at the post-1989 Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest, constitutes a step towards remedying previous suppressions (see Sound Recordings C559036, and HM83).
Doina performance was long aired in the Gurghiu Valley, upper Mureş. Bartók had recorded there in 1914 but had not documented Gypsy music-making. Contrary to Bartók's reservations concerning Gypsy command of peasant repertories, doina variants were long associated with a stigmatized community: present-day commentary acknowledges that Bartók's observations on rural hora lunga or doina do not take adequate account of cross-fertilizing influences from town-based professional musicians across Romania – namely fiddle and bass ensembles, sometimes with wind players performing solos on pan-pipes or single-reed instruments such as clarinet or taragot, with hammer-dulcimer (ţambal), accordion, and sometimes fretted-string accompaniment. Early 20th-century Gypsy orchestras elaborated doina in concerted form, with solo lines supported by pedal tones and sustained harmonies, often embellished by virtuoso ripples and cascades.
Further, the interplay of declamatory Jewish prayer cantillation with metrically free vernacular performance styles merits attention– Jewish music traditions were an unpropitious research topic in Romania during the anti-Semitic 1930s and postwar militant atheism. Instrumental doina extemporization was shared between stigmatized groups, as attested by the long-run practice of klezmorim providing music together with Gypsies for Christian weddings across the territories of central and eastern Europe. And it is known that examples of the genre travelled abroad with exiles and emigrants: for example, doine were performed by East European New York city klezmer ensembles, documented from around 1910; likewise they were appreciated in Israeli immigrant settlements.
Commercial recordings from the early decades of the century helped diffuse doina idioms associated with Lautari, Gypsy ensembles from (Turkish-influenced) southern Romania, some of whom performed for restaurant patrons in exuberant de dragoste, ‘song-of-love’ idiom, embellishing chromatic melodies associated with erotic texts.
When doina became harnessed for Romanian communist cultural management purposes, conservatory-trained arrangers shaped large-scale performances for radio and television, as well as recordings distributed by the state gramophone company and renditions in model-setting folk music competitions. ‘Doina’ was also adopted as a State-industry trade name. The genre was propagated in the service of mass indoctrination as in the Cîntarea României, Song to Romania festivals (Nixon 1998). Approved examples were taught by instructors answerable to the centrally directed Amateur Artistic Movement, and in Schools for Popular Art where folk musicians were trained and examined in music and politics before being licensed to practise. These institutions elevated and produced accomplished performers of doina, a few of whom sought to resist the stylistic standardization that official promotion often entailed. In Maramureş, attitudes at large were not always amenable to the authorities’ attempts to reinstate interpretative features associated with earlier lifestyles: from 1978–9 it became known that village residents, perforce factory commuters over recent decades, were reluctant to enact tutored hora lunga singing with glottal sobbing effects as noted by Bartók in the more rustic circumstances of 1913 (Nixon 1998). Meanwhile in expanding industrial complexes professional ensembles in peasant uniform routinely performed glittering state-emblematic renditions such as Doina Oltului (Doina of the River Olt).
It remains to be seen what enduring impact centralized didacticism and broadcasting have had on diversities of regional doina once noted; and, following the collapse of dictatorial structures in 1989, on research and teaching by Romanian musicologists who may have access to contextual information concerning the many thousands of doine reportedly archived under Communist direction. Nowadays there is a propensity for broadcasters and concert promoters loosely to apply the appellation ‘doina’ to relatively free forms of musical expression.
A. Idelsohn: Thesaurus of Oriental-Hebrew Melodies (Berlin, 1922–32)
B. Bartók: Volksmusik der Rumänen von Maramureş (Munich, 1923); ed. B. Suchoff as Romanian Folk Music, v: Maramureş County (The Hague, 1975)
A. Idelsohn: Jewish Music: Its Historical Development (New York, 1929/R)
A. Idelsohn: Jewish Liturgy and its Development (New York, 1932/R)
B. Bartók: ‘Román népzene’ [Romanian folk music], Révai lexikon, suppl. (Budapest, 1935)
B. Bartók: Miért és hogyan gyűjtsűnk népzenét? [Why and how do we collect folk music?] (Budapest, 1936), repr. in Béla Bartók Essays, ed. B. Suchoff (London, 1976), 9–24
C. Brăiloiu: ‘La musique populaire roumain’, ReM (1940) [special issue: La musique dans les pays latins]
E. Dinu: Das rumänische Volkslied (Berlin, 1940)
A. Weisser: The Modern Renaissance of Jewish Music: Events and Figures, Eastern Europe and America (New York, 1954)
S. Rosowsky: The Cantillation of the Bible: the Five Books of Moses (New York, 1957)
T. Alexandru: Béla Bartók despre folclorul românesc [Béla Bartók on Romanian folklore] (Bucharest, 1958)
J. Stutschevsky: Folklor muzikali shel Yehudey mizrakh Europa [Musical folklore of the east European Jews] (Tel-Aviv, 1958)
A. Binder: Biblical Chant (New York, 1959)
E. Comişel: ‘Preliminarii la studiul ştiinţific al doinei’ [Preliminary notes to the scientific study of the doina], Revista de folclor, iv/1–2 (1959), 147–74 [with Eng. and Russ. summaries]
J. Stutschevsky: Ha-Klezmorim [The Klezmorim] (Jerusalem, 1959)
M. Kahane: ‘Doine din Oltenia subcarpatică’ [Doine from subcarpathian Oltenia], Revista de folclor, viii/1–2 (1963), 99–116
E. Comişel: Folclor muzical (Bucharest, 1967)
E. Comişel and V. Dinu: Curs de folclor muzical (Bucharest, 1968)
E. Comişel: ‘Genurile muzicii populare româneşti: doina’ [The genres of Romanian folk music: doina], Studii de muzicologie, v (1969), 79–122 [with Fr. summary]
E. Cernea: ‘Despre evoluţia doinei bucovinene’ [On the evolution of the doina of Bukovina], Revista de etnografie şi folclor, xv/2 (1970), 133–42 [with Fr. summary]
E. Cernea: ‘Doina din nordul Transilvaniei’ [The doina of northern Transylvania], Studii de muzicologie, vi (1970), 179–206 [with Fr. summary]
T. Alexandru: ‘Béla Bartók despre doina maramureşeana’ [Béla Bartók on the Maramureş Doina], Béla Barték şi muzica românească, ed. F. László (Bucharest, 1976), 23–30
T. Alexandru: Romanian Folk Music (Bucharest, 1980)
A. Schwadron: ‘On Jewish Music’, Music of Many Cultures, ed. E. May (Berkeley, 1983), 284–306
P. Nixon: Sociality – Music – Dance: Human Figurations in a Transylvanian Valley (Göteborg, 1998)
I. Cocişiu: Folclor muzical din Judeţul Mare (Sighişoara, n.d)
Cantorials, Folkways Records FW 6940 and 6825 (1956–61)
Anthology of Romanian Folk Music, Electrecord EPE 01221 to EPE 01223 (1959–62)
Rapsodia Română, Electrecord STM-EPE 01433 (1978)
Klezmer Music (1910–1942), Folkways Records FSS-34021 (1980)
Music of Many Cultures, U. of California Press 93801 to 93803 (1983) [incl. Music of the Jews]
Collection universelle de musique populaire enregistrée, rec. 1951–8, VDE-Gallo 30–425 to 30–430 (1984)
‘Jakie Jazz ’Em Up’, Old-Time Klezmer Music 1912–1926, Global Village C101 (1985)
Roumanie: musique des Tsiganes de Valachie, Ocora C559036 (1988)
Roumanie: musique de village: Olténie, Moldavie, Transylvanie, rec. 1933–43, VDE-Gallo 537 to 539 (1988)
Roumanie: la vraie tradition de Transylvanie, Ocora Radio France HM 83 (1989)
Ensemble Klezmer Live in Prag, Extraplatte EX 317-2 (1997)
Ion Farcaş Fluiere, Electrecord ST-EPE 03725
Rencontre avec la Roumanie: Olténie, Electrecord STM-EPE 0890
Rencontre avec la Roumanie: vallée du Someş, Electrecord ST-EPE 01104
PAUL NIXON