21 DANA CIOCARLIE And so you repeat the exercise in your turn. Like George Enescu, you stitch together a certain number of pieces, you remake the patchwork in your own way. I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but that’s exactly what I do. I stitch together Romanian folk music collected by composers or ethnomusicologists, or by composers who were also ethnomusicologists, like Béla Bartók and Paul Constantinescu, in order to sketch a sonic portrait of Romania. It’s as if I were about to launch a Romanian-made musical rocket into space, and I had to decide what message to send to the aliens. Well, since you’re in command, what have you chosen to put in that capsule? What’s the head note of the potpourri you’ve prepared for the aliens? Would you prefer to send them a cheerful, optimistic message, or a melancholy, nostalgic one? Both. When you listen to my album, you hear people who want to party, to dance, to get together and tell stories – hence the mischievous and joyful side of the music, which makes you want to jump up and down, as if you had arches under your feet. There are many humorous touches, for example in the pieces by Paul Constantinescu and even in the Romanian Rhapsody, but there is also the nostalgia, the homesickness that we call dor in Romanian and which can be found in the doïna. Constantinescu’s Cântec is a doïna from the Gorj region that can enrapture you and break your heart at the same time. It’s this very emotional side that appears in the ballad Miorița, when we read the thoughts of three shepherds symbolising three regions of Romania, and we understand that two of them have decided to kill the third in order to seize his flock.
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