LDV97

DAVID GRIMAL ∙ LES DISSONANCES 17 As you said earlier, Enescu belongs to that generation of Central European composers who integrated the traditional music of their country into their own style. How is that manifested in his oeuvre? When Bartók uses folk music in his works, he retains its spirit despite a ‘simplified’ compositional style that does not attempt to transmit the intransmissible nature of oral music. In music of oral, unwritten tradition, written notation will necessarily be a simplification. To write out rhythms, to notate ornaments and untempered intonation, is to give a fixed form to phenomena that in traditional music are ephemeral and alive, and extremely difficult to ‘write’. By indicating inflections, quartertones, types of glissando and vibrato, sometimes with several markings for each note, Enescu tries to show the performer how to achieve authenticity of expression. I have the feeling that he wants us to smell the dust of the village, the sun on the wheat, the tanned skin of the old man who sang his tale to him by the roadside. Though both born on Romanian soil, one on the fringes of Hungary, the other in Moldavia, these two composers possess very dissimilar sensibilities and probably did not visit the same villages to collect their folk music. We are in the habit of imposing a ‘national’ reading of these musics when in reality they cover different territories and have a history that obeys different geographical logics.