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.