Spring Painting and Cleaning

It is finally springtime in Chișinău and people are very happy. We have had a few days of sunshine already and the week looks pretty good. The students at the Academy of Music are having a hard time staying inside the building because it seems to retain the cold and it is so nice outside. The people who care for the building have done extensive work to clean and prepare the flower beds and we are all awaiting the full show of flowers to come.

Springtime means cleaning and painting.

I am attaching some photos from my day. First of all, I took some photos at about 7:45 this morning of the newly painted benches in the park. "Vopsit" means "painted." There is a lot of fresh green paint on these benches. They are going to need the paint in the good weather ahead since already the park is full of people enjoying the sunshine.

As I made my way up Strada Nicolae Iorga toward the Academy of Music I saw these newly painted trees. Groups of volunteers came out last Saturday to clean up the parks and streets and paint the bottom of the trees. I saw the people doing these trees. They had a truck with a big container of white paint and a sprayer. It looks like the paint got away from them on a few trees! I am told that the paint helps protect the trees from bugs and makes them look good.

The volunteers were meticulously raking and picking up scraps of paper and other garbage. People were chatting and laughing together most of the day.

My local "Orange" box (a small square building along the street that sells candy, pop, cigarettes, and cards to recharge your Orange brand mobile phones) is managed by a very cheerful and energetic woman who was out painting her trees and even digging up some spots for a garden. I stopped by at 10 p.m. to buy some minutes for my phone and she was excited to show me the garden out back and to tell me that she will paint the sidewalk borders tomorrow.

Then, as I was walking home tonight, I saw this advertisement for an upcoming concert. It features some wonderful nai players including the great Vasile Iovu and Marin and Alexandru Gheras. Marin is a professional naiist who performs all over the world. He recently gave me two of his wonderful CDs and I play them all the time in my apartment. His son Alexandru is a student at the Academy of Music and is also quite a good player. I hope to attend some of the rehearsals for this concert. Marin and Alexandru will perform duets with the orchestra.

I hope it is getting to springtime wherever you are! Thanks for reading my blog.

Spring continues.....

Tonight I attended a wonderful concert at the Sala cu orgă put on by students and faculty from the Academy of Music and a music school in Iași, Romania. Following a great performance by the wonderful Academy string orchestra and a visiting percussion ensemble, we stepped out into blasts of cold wind with lots of rain. The heat in my apartment building was turned off early in March so it is now extremely cold and on days like today also quite dark. I am happy to see the end of my very high heating bills and do not like to turn on lights during the day since electricity is quite expensive, but I am looking forward to the promise of spring we have seen for weeks.

I want to acknowledge my wonderful sister-in-law who passed away last Saturday. We will miss her so much. She was a great aunt, sister, and friend to all of us and we loved the way she continued to play (and win!) online word games even in the midst of painful cancer treatment trials.

Moldova is a special place. I gave a presentation about music in Moldova last week at a Fulbright conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. I have attached two photos that accompanied that presentation. The videos cannot be put on the internet since I made a promise to the performers that I would not let them be on YouTube.

I have been especially interested in the lăutar communities (long-time musical families) in Moldova which seem to be a musical model of integrating and enhancing music from many very different communities and families. This may be the special role Moldova has to play in the world community. As I interact with colleagues at my university, I am amazed to realize that some think I am living a wealthy alpine nation, while others assume that Moldova must be in Africa since they have never heard of it. I simply encourage them to Google it.

Nicolae Botgros, conductor of the famed orchestra Lăutarii from Moldova, spoke at the Academy of Music this week. His speech was very well attended and two TV stations recorded it and have already broadcast it in its entirety. He spoke about how Moldova is in a Romanian zone, and does not produce songs or singers with a specific identity.

Maybe this is something special about Moldova. As lăutar families with Roma, Jewish, Russian, Romanian, Gagauz (Turkish), Bulgarian, and Ukrainian backgrounds intermarry and interact in everyday life they share the complexities of language and music in Moldova. Lăutar musicians may be the epitome of this special Moldovan model of working together in complicated economic situations.