Figure skating is a mixture of art and sport.
Katarina Witt
Let's start with the Romanian folk dance Hora Pe Gheata, which translates to "dance on the ice." You don't need skates to do this, a smooth wooden floor will work. To enhance the slidey effect, you can dance in socks.
Now let's get to the really good stuff. Today's post features ice dancing performed by young people from a skating club in Romania. They wear folk costumes adapted for skating.
Video #2 is Hora Primaverii (springtime dance), even though it is always winter at the skating rink. That ice has to be kept cold, you know. If the summer heat gets to you, you can always take refuge at your local ice arena. I used to ice skate but I don't anymore because it's so cold at the rink and it's difficult to move around in a heavy jacket.
Video #3 is a group of kids dancing a sirba...on ice! This was a special show that the club gave for the Romanian National Day on December 1st.
Video #4 shows the young people dancing to an excerpt from Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody #1and a medley of other folk tunes. They demonstrate exceptional talent. Who knows, they make may it into a future Winter Olympics!
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
"Winter is dead.
A. A. Milne
Spring will be here soon! Today's post features songs and dances about Martisor, celebrated on March 1 in Romania.
Martisor is also a red and white decoration such as a bracelet or brooch worn during the month of March, to celebrate the arrival of spring. There is a similar holiday in Bulgaria on March 1, Baba Marta Day. The main difference is that the Romanian holiday was originally a New Year celebration (the ancient Romans celebrated the New Year on March 1). The Bulgarian celebration honors a mythical figure, Baba Marta, and people wear adornments called Martenitsa in order to please Baba Marta so that spring will come early. These are given to friends and relatives for good luck and health.
The first video is of a children's group, who perform two songs and a dance in honor of Martisor. The dance is called Hora Martisorului. Notice the stigaturi (shouts), these are typical of Romanian folk dances.
Video #2 is a pop-folk song with all the ladies dressed in red and white, titled Martisor, which is another one of those earworms that will take up residence in your head for hours. If you are a regular visitor to this blog, you have listened to lots of them. The song is lively and cheerful, and although I couldn't find the lyrics or a translation it's well worth a listen. From what I can gather it's about the arrival of spring (primavara in Romanian).
Not only are they dressed for the holiday, they're carrying bunches of flowers as well. The costumes are a bit on the sexy side...eye candy for the guys?
Video is a group of young dancers from Calarasi, in southern Romania, dancing a sirba in honor of spring, followed by a medley of other traditional dances. The "embroidery" on the screen behind the dancers will get your attention.
I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.
Ray Charles
Today's post features music by three female Romanian folk singers. Two of them are almost unknown in the United States.
We begin with Maria Tanase, born in a suburb of Bucharest in 1913, and best known for her song Ciuleandra. You can find the lyrics here in Romanian, English and German. While you're there, check out the rest of the Songbook for Nearsighted People, a collection of folk songs with translations (mostly in German and some in English).
She became interested in folk singing at a young age and gave many performances in Europe and the United States. Unfortunately she died from cancer shortly before her 50th birthday. Maria Tanase has often been compared to Edith Piaf, a French singer from the mid 20th century, because of her sultry voice.
There is a dance to this song, and it's very popular among international folk dance groups around the world.
The next song, also performed by Maria Tanase is Bun ii vinu' ghiurghiuliu. It has a very danceable rhythm (7/16), and a cimbalom (tambal) accompaniment. You can find the lyrics here.
By the way, Romanian wine is very good, but not easy to find in my area. I drank some at a friend's graduation party last year which was held in a Romanian restaurant. It was open bar, too!
7/8 or 7/16 is the rhythm for rachenitsa, the national dance of Bulgaria. When rachenitsa crosses the border into Romania it becomes geampara.
Aneta Stan is from Dobrogea, in southeastern Romania. She performs songs from all the folklore regions of Romania, however, much of her repertoire is from Dobrogea.
Dobrudja is divided in two parts: Northern Dobrogea in Romania, and Southern Dobrudja in Bulgaria.The spelling is slightly different for each country. For you geography buffs out there, this is the region between the Danube and the Black Sea.
Stan, born in 1944, lived a good portion of her life during the repressive dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. He ruled Romania with an iron hand from the mid 1960's until his assassination on Christmas Day, 1989. The borders were surrounded with barbed wire and watch towers, and those who tried to escape were shot. Ceaușescu's austerity program in that country included the rationing of food, heat and electricity which were sold to pay off Romania's foreign debt.
She is not well-known in the United States, although, according to the interview here in Romanian, she has given concerts all over the world. The places that made the biggest impression on her were Africa, Italy and New York City. During her stay in New York, she volunteered at a hospital and cared for an elderly patient.
She visited the United States during one of her performing tours and her impression was that "America was as gray as Romania" and that at night everything came alive with light. She was probably describing the bright lights of New York City.
The song Cernavoda is about Aneta Stan's home town. It's on the Danube, River of Many Names, in the region of Dobrogea, and has a Bulgarian name which translates to "dark water."
If you listen closely, you can hear a bagpipe (cimpoi). By the way the dance to this is a sirba, and the rhythm closely resembles the Bulgarian pravo horo.
Ileana Constantinescu, born in 1929, is another singer little known outside Romania. She also used the odd rhythms of Dobrogea in her music (she was born in the region of Oltenia, southern Romania) The song, Dunare (Danube) is an example of schiopa, a rhythm related to Bulgarian daichovo, but with the accents on different beats.
The lyrics to Dunare can be found here, along with a translation in English..This is a very haunting love song with lots of rhythm. The recording is from the year 1954.
The Cernavoda Blog (blog in Romanian with a playlist of Aneta Stan's greatest hits) with a short bio of the singer. She was made an honorary citizen of the town in 2003.
Today's featured instrument is the cimbalom, which is the Hungarian name for the instrument known as the hammered dulcimer (in English) or tambal (in Romanian). It is a distinctive element of Romanian folk music, especially in taraf bands. I will use the words cimbalom and tambal interchangeably.
My daughter definitely thought the cimbalom was an instrument from Hell when I played the fourth video in this post. There are some people out there who absolutely despise tambal and in cases like that it can be useful as an instrument of torture. Percussion instruments tend to have that effect on susceptible individuals. Keep that in mind when your neighbors have noisy late night parties this summer and don't invite you.
Here is a folk dance from Romania familiar to many: Hora de Mina. The bagpipe and the panpipes play the melody, and the tambal is the rhythm section.
The next video is of Toni Iordarce. He was known in Romania as the "Paganini of the Cimbalom." Unfortunately, he died at a young age (45) from diabetic complications. During the later years of Ceaușescu's brutal regime (he was executed on Christmas Day, 1989) there was rationing of food, fuel, and medicine. The majority of Romanian citizens (except for Party functionaries) often went hungry, had no heat in their apartments during long, cold winters, and died from diseases easily treated or controlled in the West. This was probably the case with Iordarce.
It is a pleasure to watch him play.
This is a folk tune made famous in an arrangement for violin by Grigoraş Ionică Dinicu, Ciocarlia, played on the cimbalom and accompanied by orchestra.
The musician is Victor Copacinschi and the video is from 1976. The video is in black and white. Color TV broadcasts did not exist in Romania until 1983.
This is a sirba, a popular Romanian folk dance, played on tambal and accordion, from the region of Dobrogea (south-east Romania).
The Alien Diaries will be taking a short break. The next post will be on or about March 1st. There are over 200 posts written over the course of nearly four years....you will be sure to find something that you like. Thanks for reading!
Musicians tend to get bored playing the same thing over and over, so I think it's natural to experiment.
Dimebag Darrell
WQXR has been New York City's classical music station since 1936. I began listening to WQXR when I was about 12 years old. If you like classical music, you can listen to this radio station anywhere in the world as long as you have an Internet connection.
Today's post features two videos from the WQXR Cafe Concerts. You don't often find classical musicians playing music from the Balkans (probably because of the unusual rhythms), but there are some adventurous people out there.....
I found the first video by accident when I was searching for different versions of Gankino Horo, a Bulgarian dance tune.
The Canellakis-Brown duo plays it on piano and cello.I was pleasantly surprised since I'm so used to the accordion arrangement by Boris Karlov. They do an amazing job, especially since this is a difficult meter (11/16) for non-Bulgarians to master, and they play it FAST. (I wonder if they're folk dancers?)
The next piece is much slower. Although there is no one singing here, a doina is a Romanian folk song, rather melancholy in nature. This one was arranged by Grigoras Dinicu. He wrote a number of pieces based on Romanian folk tunes, the most famous being Hora Staccato, a favorite among classical violinists.
The things that stand out are often the oddities.
Pierre Salinger
Today's post features more odds and ends from the Universe of You Tube. I hope you enjoy them.
There are some amazing Romanian folk musicians in the first video. Anyone who can play a tune on a bottle of booze deserves my respect! Afterwards, he drinks the contents, a distilled spirit called tuica.
The second part of this video is a tune called Ciocarlia (The Lark) and the music coming out of that panpipe is definitely for the birds :) Check out the interaction between the panpipe player and the violinist.
For more information on Romanian distilled spirits (according to the article it's related to slivovitz) check out this link.
One of my dance buddies forwarded this to me via e-mail. This is the Sirtaki from Zorba the Greek, conducted by Andre Rieu. He and his orchestra have an unconventional approach approach to concerts: dancing and audience involvement are allowed and encouraged. There is no stuffiness at these events, this group is dancing in the aisles. Andre Rieu's concerts usually feature music from the Viennese composers of the Hapsburg era: Strauss, Lehar and Kalman. (Actually the last two composers were Hungarians.)
If you love Balkan music and dance you have come to the right place! The Alien Diaries began in February 2010 and is updated at least twice a month.
This blog is dedicated to the memory of my cat Fatso (see avatar), who passed away on April 9, 2011 from congestive heart failure. He was the inspiration for several of my early posts.
Don't forget to check out my second blog, Light and Shadow, for some humor, satire, photos and poetry!
