Flutes and archives

My amazing colleague and nai teacher from the Academy of Music has been having me help out with teaching flute. Today I made a very complicated repair on a flute belonging to one of his students and last week I coached the flute students as they prepared for some performances. This has been fun for me. I am in an environment where I mostly have to do everything in which I am not competent - speaking Russian and Romanian, playing the nai, and living in Moldova, a very different place from Laramie, Wyoming. It has all been fun, but I have enjoyed being able to make some kind of contribution. Tomorrow I hope to work in the archives of recordings of folkloric performances dating back to the 1960s. I was there last week and found it to be an amazing collection of material mostly on reel to reel tapes. Much of it cannot be played because of the condition of the tapes, but much of it is very accessible from a computerized archive. My host for listening to the collection is a very talented graduate student who plays violin as well as studying ethnomusicology. I am hoping to assist him in creating some kind of backup and sound playback system. I also have access now to phonograph recordings from the mid to late 20th century. I find this especially interesting for the synthesis of jazz and Moldovan music played by "tarafs" or bands that play for weddings and other special family events. I find that in Moldova, more than in any other European country I have visited, people know something about the music of the villages and even use it for things like cell phones ring tones. I want to know more about why this is so.