15 DANA CIOCARLIE Dear Dana, we might as well say it straight away: you and I are first cousins and very close in more ways than one – you make music and I write; you were born in Bucharest, I was born in Timișoara; you live in Paris, I live in Luxembourg. We’re both strange birds, because we inherited the same (almost unpronounceable) name, Ciocârlie, which means ‘lark’ in Romanian. For my part, as soon as I left Romania for a French-speaking country, I realised that I was going to have to find some way of getting round the hackneyed old song ‘Alouette, gentille alouette, je te plumerai’, which invariably came up, either just after the introductions or in the course of conversation. So I gave the first book I wrote in French the title Un miroir aux alouettes. Petit dictionnaire de la pensée nomade [A decoy for catching larks: a short dictionary of nomadic thought]. Up until now, you had never really felt the need to explore this onomastic vein, to interpret in your own way your role as a bird that sings in flight. Now, with the album Ciocârlia, you’ve done so. Corina Mersch (Corina Ciocârlie) Yes, the idea came to me all of a sudden. I realised that our family name was a Romanian symbol all by itself, that I was a ‘high-flying songbird’, and yet I had never capitalised on this coincidence, or this sign of destiny, even though I perhaps had a vocation, a voice to give to Romanian music. Admittedly, I had already made a recording some time ago intended as a sonic portrait of Romania, but that was a considerably less ambitious project. This time, I wanted to summon our totem, the lark, and have it travel across the country, from Dobruja to Transylvania, trying to imagine what it might hear as it flew over those regions. I let it glean music that evoked a wide variety of landscapes, and had it sketch portraits of peasants, city dwellers, artists and so on.
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