nai video blog

Liz Lipschultz, a Fulbright English teacher living in Comrat, Moldova is keeping a fantastic video blog. I highly recommend looking at all of entries. Her most recent video is about nai. Many thanks to Liz for her excellent work! Here is the address so you can see it! http://moldovamoldovamoldova.wordpress.com/ 

Lautarii and the nai maker

It continues to be very cold in Chisinau but today the sun is out. It is not like Wyoming with its dry air. We are very close to the Black Sea so the air is humid and stays very cold even in the sunshine. When the wind blows up from the southwest it is bitter! Yesterday I went to see Lautarii, one of the national folklore ensembles in Moldova. It is led by Nikolae Botgros, a member of a family with a long standing line of "lautars" or professional musicians.

The original lautars were primarily Roma musicians serving as slaves in Turkish and Romanian courts starting in about the 16th century. They were required to play all kinds of music in order to earn money for their masters - Turkish and Western European classical music as well as Moldovan village music for weddings and other special events. After the end of slavery in the mid 1800s these musicians continued to perform and developed guilds of players capable of playing a wide variety of musical forms for every kind of event. This may have been the beginning of the fascinating ability of Moldovan musicians to use nai, cobza (lute with an attitude), and other local instruments for all these kinds of music. This ensemble of 17 violins, bass, cymbalom, two accordions, two trumpets, two valve trombones, two clarinets, and nai, played with speed and precision that is hard to believe. The president of Moldova spoke along with many dignitaries in honor of the 40th anniversary of the group (it always seems that there is an anniversary connected with concerts) and it went on for five hours. Earlier in the day I had the pleasure of spending two and a half hours with master nai maker Grigori Covaliu in his workshop in the village of Durlesti. He is a dedicated and talented craftsman with a wide reputation for his excellent work. I now am very happy to own two of his instruments, one with a three octave range and one with that plus four extra low notes. We talked (all in Romanian) and played many different nai plus a lot of other flute type instruments that he makes. It was a great adventure for me to ride the 101 microbus to the Alimentara Izhvor (a sort of convenience store with two springs by it) where I called Covaliu and he walked down from his house to show me the way. A great day!

colinde and school lunch

I have been treated to lots of Moldovan Christmas and winter songs (colinde) during the past week. I love them for their simple and beautiful melodies. Children's songs tend to be syllabic while adult colinde are more melismatic but not anything like the "glorias" in "Angels We Have Heard on High." Last week Andrei, one of the young people who run Acasa la Mama (my neighborhood Moldovan food restaurant) gave me a CD of colinde because we had talked about them one evening. Last Monday I attended a beautiful concert of colinde at the Sala cu Orgel featuring a solo female singer and a wonderful classical guitarist. Their arrangements were excellent, the performance was great, and the setting was quite elegant.

Then today I went to a festival-competition for the performance of Moldovan winter traditions at a school in the neighborhood called "Botanica." I heard about fifteen schools present various versions of Moldovan winter and Christmas musical and dramatic forms. These include a hilarious acting out of a man trying to sell a goat. The goat gets sick and they call in a doctor or a gypsy healer and then haggle a lot over the price. We also heard boys doing men's songs with a whip, bells, and a friction drum and shouting. There were a few beautiful solo songs and at the end of each performance lots of new year well-wishing and throwing of grain (the adjudicators were covered in grain). I knew two of the adjudicators and they invited me to "share the table" with them which in this case meant a school lunch at the Liceul Teoretic "L. Rebreanu." It was excellent. We had large bowls of soup, bread, beets, cabbage, two kinds of meat, fried potatoes, cheese bread, Moldovan pizza, juice, and hot tea. We all felt well fortified to hear more performances! And I may not have to eat for a few days.

End of semester and holidays

Today (Saturday the 11th) is quite cold with a good stiff breeze from the northwest. People keep telling me that it will get even colder in the next few days. The students have finished their exams and most of their concerts, but the Academy building was full of people today. I practiced there all morning and especially enjoyed the decorations the door people have put up. The woman in charge today just beamed when I told her that they were "foarte frumos! (very beautiful). Downtown is now looking very festive with a large Christmas tree and lots of lights all around. There is even a small holiday train for taking children around. Everyone is bundled up against the cold but having a great time. The stray dogs are becoming a bit more aggressive about trying to catch pigeons in the park and it seems like adults and children are trying stay warm by chasing the pigeons. My normal walk home from the academy of music takes me past the president's residence and the past three days or so I have been detoured by a policeman. It appears that there are men dressed in fancy white uniforms (maybe for the holidays) at the door of the house waiting for someone important. This is fun to see, but the people I talk to are hoping for some positive political action now that the elections are over. As always, it is an interesting and festive time to be in Moldova. I am looking forward to a concert of colinde, Christmas songs, on Monday at the Sala cu orga.

Many hands

Some people have asked me if all the leaf sweepers become snow shovelers when it snows, and I can tell you that they do! Throughout October and November all over Chisinau people came out with brooms, many of them handmade with a bundle of sticks, and swept leaves every day in front of businesses and public buildings and especially in Pushkin Park and around the big statue of Stefan cel Mare. The statue is the main place to meet people in the center of the city. If you want to meet up you can just say, "See you at the statue" and everyone knows what you mean. Today as I passed the statue I saw the leaf sweepers out with snow shovels, many of them handmade from cardboard or pieces of scrap wood, shoveling. They began to make their way up into the park, but then it began to rain - hard! The snow all turned to slush and I hope they were able to go some place warm. I served as an international observer during the national elections last week and saw the same kind of team work among the election workers. I was stationed at a very busy polling place where almost 1800 ballots were cast. I sat with about a dozen observers, most from political parties but about five of us were impartial, and watched as a very efficient team worked to keep things moving for the voters and make sure that the election rules were followed and everyone was able to vote. They were great! I sat for twelve hours with a great team of people dedicated to making democracy work in Moldova. I was quite moved by their dedication and hopes for the country. At exactly 9:00 p.m. the election team went to work to count the votes. They took the two very large boxes of votes and dumped them out on a large table and went to work. The team of about ten took each ballot and straightened it and put it in a pile. Since there were 39 political parties each ballot was about two feet long and had been folded to be able to fit into the boxes which were pretty full by about 2 p.m. Everyone worked carefully and I knew that the team would take all those ballots, straighten them, and count them fairly. Some of the observers from specific parties were pretty pushy, but the election team was very patient with them and went about their work. They finished at about midnight and we all went home. I am so impressed with the way people in Moldova work this way in so many situations. They are careful and respectful of each other and many hands make seemingly enormous jobs possible to finish.

Winter in Chisinau!

Today it is winter. It is the kind of damp cold that makes -4 C feel like the coldest weather ever. We have had a good stiff wind all day and now it has been snowing pretty well for about three hours. I am having to reorganize my Moldovan fashion statement and I am happy to see that knit caps are acceptable. I must learn the Russian and Romanian words for all the winter apparel. High heels are still on the streets but furs have come out of storage. When I arrived at the Academy of Music at 8:00 a.m. the woman at the door pinched my cheeks and laughed because they were so red. The big Christmas tree was erected in the main square today and I discovered the tree behind my TV set. It is already decorated so I only need to plug it in to make it light up. As I arrived at the apartment building this afternoon a person leaving instructed me to be sure to close the outer door. Tonight I went to Acasa la Mama and discovered an amazing Moldovan soup. I was looking through books for Moldovan Christmas songs to play (Colinde) and the waiter went through his list of 5000 tunes on his computer so he could play some for me. As I left the restaurant there were lots of people out enjoying the snow, walking dogs, pushing children down the street using cardboard boxes for sleds, and peering out from their giant furry hoods. Tomorrow I will go to an English language class at the State Pedagogical Institute to play some Christmas carols on my flutes and have them sing some Christmas carols. I will miss the daily skate skiing in Wyoming this winter, but Chisinau seems to be ready for the cold weather. I see on the BBC news that there is a big cold snap in northern Europe today and I think it might be headed our way.