Szék: sheep, and music

I was really happy to return to Sic (Szék) after a year of not being there. I hadn’t been back for awhile because it’s a heavily Hungarian-speaking village (my Hungarian speaking skills are still sadly low, although my Romanian is getting better), so it requires some planning ahead. I went with translator/brácsás Fenyvesi Attila. 

Even though I hadn’t been back in a year, the musicians remembered me. I felt more comfortable with greater knowledge of the music and culture than I had a year ago, and they were more willing to share information.

The part about sheep

The highlight of the trip was visiting Sipos Marci, a brácsás who works full-time as a shepherd, while he was out tending his sheep. He’s out with them pretty much day and night from mid-April till the end of December, coming back to the village just one day per week on the weekends. 

We drove to where he was grazing his sheep outside the village: up some steep, rocky roads and past the water tank for the town, up to a ridge with views overlooking the hills and forests on all sides of the village.

As we drove up to where his van is parked, dogs started running and barking next to the car. He has many dogs: as far as I could count, there are 2-3 small dogs which are bred to herd the sheep, and 3-4 large ones which are guard dogs. They are keeping watch for wolves; less frequently, there are bear sightings. Also, since the economy has been bad and with increasing inflation, more people are stealing sheep. 

Sipos Marci walked up to us from lower on the slope, where his sheep where grazing. Right now he is tending 780 sheep, and 5 goats. Seemed like a lot to me, but actually 400 more sheep had recently been sold! These sheep are being raised for meat. In the past, he was raising them for milk, and they had to be milked twice a day. 

Pointing around to the 360-degree views of rolling hills with close-cropped grass from generations of sheep grazing and patches of forest, Sipos Marci said that he’s taken sheep on all the areas we could see. He’s even grazed them in the forest, where they’ll eat acorns. 

From the age of 10, he was helping to herd sheep on school breaks. By the age of 17, he was doing it by himself full-time. He was even raising sheep during his 2-year compulsory military service. During that time, he was taking care of a flock that belonged to the regiment in Bethlen, 50 km from Szék. This was surprising to me, because people have told me it was common to be sent far across the country for military service (and I didn’t know that herding sheep was a military assignment). He said that although he was close to home, the experience was still very difficult: his bosses only spoke to him in Romanian, which he didn’t understand at the time. 

However, he remembered some Romanian, and actually spoke to me in Romanian a bit. That was one difference between this visit and last year— the musicians spoke to me a little in Romanian, despite being more comfortable in Hungarian.

He had the small sheep-herding dogs demonstrate how they herd the sheep, and it was a beautiful sight. They quickly ran around the perimeter of the sheep, barking, and the sheep flowed down in an undulating movement. 

There is an enclosure for the sheep that they go into at night, a portable fence that needs to be moved every 5 days as to not degrade any one patch of land too much. Marci said that he chooses to wait until it’s completely dark before taking the sheep in, because they’re calmer in the morning that way. 

The sheep ended up going into the enclosure on their own while we were talking. Once they were in there, they became totally quiet and still— and that was quite a sight to behold, hundreds of woolly sheep standing in the dark in complete silence.

I asked him if he was lonely there. He said, “yes, it’s lonely… you are far from people. But people are bad, even in the village.” 


The part about music

I asked him how he learned to play.

He said that when he was a child, his mother would go to Hungary to sell stuff there. She was able to go only once every two years because border restrictions were strict at the time. When Sipos Marci was 10 or 11 years old, she brought him a furulya (simple wooden flute). 

When he was 14, his mom asked him “what do you want (from Hungary)?” He responded, “cigány muzsika” (muzsika is a local name for hegedű, or violin). He associated the violin with Roma (cigány) players because he mostly saw them playing. The next time she went to Hungary, she brought him a violin, and he started to play.

Pali Marci, a Széki prímás around the same age as Sipos Marci, also became interested in the violin at around the same time. Sipos Marci then started playing the brácsa a couple of years later, at 17. At that point, he was out with the sheep most of the time, so Pali Marci had more availability to take gigs as a prímás, so it was more advantageous for Sipos Marci to play the brácsa than the violin. 


I asked if there was a particular brácsás he was learning from. He said that he was too young to learn from the band of Icsán (the prímás Adam István “Icsán,” 1909-1980, one of the most revered Széki musicians). He had just come back from the military and within a few years both Icsán and his son, Icsán Pityu, a brácsás, had died. 

He said: “Then I was still learning the violin. I was also learning kontra, but there was no one to learn it from. So I would peek” (watch players and pick up things from them).


He mentioned learning some chords from Ilka Gyurika (Széki prímás we watched play with Sipos Marci this year and last year) and his brother Ilka Miki, who was a brácsás. 

He also mentioned learning chords from Éri Péter, the brácsás in Muzsikás, one of the most famous bands associated with the táncház movement. He said, “I learned the chords one by one like this as I could see their fingers”. 

He then asked Attila “Is your brácsa not here? Let’s bring it down and play a bit. I’ll show you which chord I learned from which musician.”

Here’s what he showed us:

  • He learned C—> D7 from Doór Róbert, the bassist who played with Szalonna.

  • He learned H—> C°—> E from a brácsás from Bonchida he called Márton bácsi, later adding that that man was a “kicsi törpe ember” (a short gnome guy) 

  • He learned F# (interestingly, he used the Romanian and Hungarian names for this chord: “fa-dièse, or some kind of fisz”) from a bassist in Szamosújvár (Gherla) 

  • He learned G, D, A, E from István Sándor bátya (“bátya” means older brother), the brácsás of Dobos Károly.



Some observations: 

— he learned a lot from bassists. When he said “I learned this chord from Doór Róbert”, Attila asked “Doór Róbert played brácsa?”. Sipos Marci said “I don’t know, but he grabbed it and I saw a chord from him”. 

— the feedback loop between revival players like Éri Péter and local musicians from Szék is interesting… the more well-known direction of knowledge-sharing is the revival players learning from local Széki musicians, but clearly it went the other way as well.

— he wasn’t demonstrating one chord at a time, but rather a progression of 2 or 3 chords… ie, how he would use them in context. 

— his process of chord acquisition (learning chords one by one building on a “vocabulary” he already had, based on what other players might have found lacking in his playing and therefore showed him) reminds me of language acquisition, including my own process of learning Romanian. 


Other aspects of the trip

— The day before we arrived in Szék, we visited Ioan Hârleț “Nucu” in Budești. He was in good spirits and played well. He played some melodies which I hadn’t heard him play in any of my previous visits there. 

— We attended folk music/dance events in Gherla (Szamosújvár) and Vișea (Visa), which are both in the vicinity of Szék. One highlight of the event in Visa was seeing old couples dance, backed up by the Palatkai band.

— We also had the chance to visit with Sallai Pista bácsi, the old singer/dancer, and buy some pálinka from him. 

— People from Szék are known for being hard-working, and this seems particularly true now, with the current tough economic outlook. Gyurika and Pali Marci both work construction jobs, and their wives are doing domestic work in Cluj 5 or 6 days a week, only coming home for a day or 2 on the weekends. 

— Our trip wrapped up nicely with listening to/jamming with Gyurika and Sipos Marci, with some singing and dancing from Sallai Pista bácsi. 

Budești: “Smoke, dust, they are gone.”

Ioan Hârleț “Nucu” is a violinist who lives in the village of Budești, in Bistrița county. Near the edge of town, in the shadow of a big hill, there is a steep turnoff from the main road leading to a small unpaved street of colorful houses. Everyone living on that street is related to Nucu.

I’ve been to visit Nucu two times. The first time was in October with Fenyvesi Attila and Kovács Blanka Debora, and the second time was in March with Török Ákos and Dan Kunda Thagard.

Nucu speaks Romanian. Thanks to Debora and Ákos for your help translating in Budești, and Oana Chiș for your help later transcribing and translating some of the recordings I made there.

The following is a composite of what Nucu said on both visits:

— He was born on March 11, 1944 in Budești. Nucu’s father played the bass. He remembers being fascinated by music from a very young age. He started playing violin at the age of six. Whenever musicians were playing in Budești, he would watch them, trying to memorize what they were doing and attempting to replicate as much as he could at home:

“Well, I was 6, 7, 8 years old. They were hiring musicians for summertime, from the end of Advent (Christmas fasting) to autumn. Every Sunday they were hired to play after the celebration, after church— there was a beautiful lowland in the center and they played there every holiday. And me, as a child, I was going and listening to musicians and after a while I started to love it, and my dad had a violin in the house. And I started to play it and catch some things to put out a song, and then my father took me to learn it. I studied it for 4 years.”

— By the time he was nine years old, he had figured how to play some songs on his own. His dad saw that he was clearly interested, and organized for him to take lessons every Sunday with a local musician, Covaci Alexandru. Nucu said that Alexandru was “the best musician from around the region”. He died about 30 years ago.

— Those lessons consisted mainly of Covaci Alexandru playing and Nucu watching him, trying to memorize the songs, and then going home and figuring them out. Covaci played and taught by ear, like most of the musicians in the area. Nucu said that very few musicians in his scene used notation, and that he doesn’t see the point of using notation to learn folk music.

— He started playing with a band:

And then, when I was like 9, 10 years old, here in our village I played in the summertime, and in neighboring villages I started to play at weddings; I formed a band. And I still learned, I still learned until now, now I don’t learn because now it is done.

We were just 3 people: a violin, a contră or braci— however you call it, we call it “contră”— and a gordonă contrabass. They were older than me, and they told me “you have to do it that way and that way” because I was young, 10-11 years old. My father was playing contrabass and we had a good bracist.

— He has warm memories of performing with a local folk dance troupe. They used to tour the country for competitions, and they won some big prizes. He said, “there were many bands there (at competitions), from Palatca, from Ceuaș, but people liked our music and dance from Budești very much”. Only two members of the dance troupe are still alive now.

— When Nucu was in his prime, people would book him seven or eight months in advance for weddings— they planned weddings around his availability. In the early 2000s, people started hiring manele bands instead of the traditional folk bands. Nowadays, they just use recorded music. He said that he thinks that musical traditions are dying off faster in Romania than in other places.

— Nucu plays using a left-hand technique I’ve never seen before: he almost exculsively uses the first 3 fingers, without the pinky finger. [He has always played this way, even prior to the stroke that reduced his finger mobility.] I would like to find out more about if there are other fiddlers in the region who use this fingering style.

— He was invited to Hungary starting in 1997 to perform and teach, and has returned there many times. Táncház musicians and institutions there have taken an interest in his style of playing, which I find interesting because Nucu said that he played primarily for Romanian events and audiences. He said that there are only two Hungarian families in Budești. Nevertheless, the Hungarian government even awarded him a pension, which he used to build houses for his family.

— He’s self-effacing and modest. He said that when he was first invited to Hungary, he was asked to teach a workshop for music teachers who were all classically trained, and he wondered “how could I teach these people”. But they reassured him that they found value in learning the way he plays.

— A few years ago, he suffered a stroke which necessitated a long recovery. He wasn’t sure he would be able to play again. He said he cried when he picked up the violin again and realized he could still play.

I was playing very well for a period of time but for some time now, maybe because I am old and maybe because I had two facial paralyses, this is why I speak so bad, and I had a cerebral necropsy, that was the most serious of all. And since then my left hand doesn’t help me, I lost my fingering and I can’t play with my fingers as I know from my head. My head works, I’m old but my head works, but my fingers are not working as they used to. I am no longer playing to practice, and maybe if I would practice more my fingers would work better.

— Referring to musicians he used to play with:

They are all dead! Smoke, dust, they are gone. I am the only one left, but I don’t have much time either and I will leave too. I am very sorry that I have 40 nepoți (grandchildren, grand-neices and -nephews), but none of them learned anything. I am very sad because of this. Bicycles and football! (is all they’re interested in).

Hearing Nucu play makes me feel as if I’m in a time machine— I’ve never heard anyone who sounds quite like him. I’m very glad I have been able to meet him, and am looking forward to going back to Budești soon.

In memoriam: Speranța Rădulescu

On January 21, 2022, Speranța Rădulescu succumbed to a fight with cancer.

She was an inspiration to me as a leading light in the field of ethnomusicology in Romania. She wrote incisively about folk musicians and cared deeply about their lives and traditions.

She founded the Ethnophonie record label and was responsible for producing truly great recordings of folk musicians from every corner of Romania. This collection has been an invaluable resource for me.

She was also responsible for bringing bands such as Taraf de Haïdouks abroad for the first time, giving them international exposure. When I was in Clejani in December, Gheorghe Anghel “Caliu” talked nostalgically about his first tour in 1988, when Speranța brought Taraful din Clejani (which later became known as Taraf de Haïdouks) to Geneva and Paris, and what a life-changing experience that was for him.

You can read Caliu’s recollections of Speranța, as well as many others’, here.

I met her in 2018 when I was in Bucharest presenting a concert with Shaun Williams. A local TV station showed up to interview us, and Speranța was featured in that segment:

She graciously agreed to write a letter of recommendation for me for Fulbright, saying she was happy to support my research because I would work with “the real folk musicians from this province: excellent idea!”. I don’t know if I would have gotten approved for this grant without her help.

I wish I had gotten a chance to work with her more, and to talk to her about the process she went through to record these bands.

May her memory be a blessing.

Székelyudvarhely: "As silence is important to music, forgetting is important to learning"

I first met brácsás Kedves Botond (Boti) in the summer of 2019 at Kalotaszentkirály folk music camp. I remember watching him play late into the night with his impressive band, Kedves Zenekar.

He told me back then that he does a lot of teaching, so I was excited to be able to check out what he is doing with his students as part of this Fulbright grant. He lives and teaches in Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc), in the largely Hungarian-speaking region of Székelyföld.

So far, I have observed his lessons and talked to him about teaching on 2 separate occasions: in October 2021 and January 2022.

In October, I was there with Fenyvesi Attila, who was translating from Hungarian to English. Boti told me about some basic principles of his teaching philosophy. Mostly he teaches private lessons, to students of all ages. Some key take-aways from that conversation:

— He puts a lot of thought into age-appropriate teaching. For younger kids, he has developed games and songs to make learning fun.

— Playing the brácsa is tiring for beginner students, so he’ll have them rest their hands by playing something on the piano.

— He teaches with the students’ interests in mind. For example, if a student likes to paint, he encourages them to make connections between chords and different colors.

— Since brácsa is a chordal instrument, I was interested to see how he teaches the foundational skills of knowing which note is in which chord. He uses a chart (pictured below) which shows the circle of fifths and the relative major and minor chords.

— He emphasized that “feelings lead first, then definitions”, meaning that the students should first learn by ear how it feels to change chords, then learn the theoretical concepts later.

— He accompanied me on some tunes, then provided some tips on how to be an effective prímás (violinist who leads the band). He said that clearly starting and ending the piece is crucial:

  • I should play some starting chords before starting the piece. This is a non-verbal cue that lets the rest of the band know which key I’m starting in.

  • In the very first phrase of a piece, I should play the melody without too much ornamentation so that the rest of the band can pick up what piece I am playing and start in the right tempo.

  • For ending a piece, I should watch the brácsás’s bow in order to “catch” their bow changes. Then it’s easier to show a clear ending.

— Like Fazakas Levente, he emphasized that learning the melodies without ornamentation is important for many reasons, one of which is that you can more easily recognize the same tune in different regional styles.

— His goal is to help students develop skills so that they can learn independently. He wants them to be “hardworking, persistent, and bold”.

— He said that listening to recordings from the archive is important not only in order for students to hear players who are masters of their instruments, but because those players represent values which can be followed in order to live in a consequent way. This part of the conversation reminded me a bit of Shinichi Suzuki’s writing about character development as a part of music education. I’d like to talk to more folk music teachers here about this topic.

— He advises students to practice every 2nd day because having a rest day strengthens synapses involved in learning. He said “as silence is important to music, forgetting is important to learning”.

When I returned to Székelyudvarhely in January 2022, I brought a larger group of visiting klezmer musicians: Dan Kunda Thagard, Zafer Mamili (who play together in the Montreal Fidl Kapelye), Rebecca Macinnes and Mattias Kaufmann (whose band Mamaliga recently released a really cool album).

The group was interested in learning some of the basics of brácsa technique — how to hold the instrument in a comfortable way, and basic chord progressions.

Two of Boti’s students, Zsófi and Bence, graciously helped to translate! Here are some take-aways from that lesson:

— In terms of holding the instrument, the angle should be almost perpendicular to the ground, but if you tilt it slightly, you’ll get an ideal angle for gravity to help with drawing the bow.

— Boti taught us a set of tunes from the core repertoire of music from the Udvarhelyszék region (which includes Székelyudvarhely) that he uses to teach beginners. He also demonstrated how he will teach beginners simple chord changes to start with, teaching more complicated chord progressions to the same song once the student is more advanced.

Learning a new instrument is difficult, and I’m glad we were able to get instruction from an expert pedagogue.

Szászcsávás: "My raining boot is throwing with mud"

Very excited to share an English translation of a song in Romani from a recording I made of Dumnezeu singing (which I included in a previous blog post) in Szászcsávás. Huge thanks to Alexandra Vidrașcu for her work translating this song!

I wanted to get a translation of this song because it seems like an important song in Szászcsávás: Dumnezeu played an instrumental version of it, then chose to sing it later, and then in subsequent visits to Szászcsávás I heard Mezei Sanyika playing it, as well as Mezei Alin’s son, who is learning how to play the violin.

Here is the translation from Alexandra:

Threw me out nine times, father, roma people!

And still counting, my father, world!

But nothing remained, only myself and I.

'Don't go, you, womanizer! My longing, roma people!

But it didn't remain only myself and I,

Don't go, you, womanizer!

My longing, roma people!'

This is what people say, oh, poor world!

That they will beat me on the way, oh, poor people!

But leave it! Let them say whatever they want to say,

Only if it' s not the truth! Oh, poor people!

But leave it! Let them say whatever they want to say,

Only if it' s not the truth! Oh, poor people!

And even if it's raining and pouring with rain, oh, poor roma people!

It's raining and pouring with rain, oh, poor roma people!

But my raining boot is throwing with mud, oh, poor roma people!

My woman wants to be kissed, oh, poor roma people!

But my raining boot is throwing with mud, oh, poor roma people!

My woman wants to be kissed, oh, poor roma people!

A note from Alexandra:

“I don't know about the accuracy of the translation in the sense that not all words have been understood in Romany language. In some parts, I've tried to express the meaning, not necessarily the words, because some words cannot be exactly translated in English from Romany. For example the word “womanizer”— I’m not sure if it's the suitable word to use there”.

She said she will ask for input from some Romany speakers and let me know if she’d make any changes to the translation based on what they tell her.

Csíkszereda: "I started playing music when I started playing folk music"

After a couple of days in Szászcsávás, we drove east through the Harghita mountains to the region of Székelyföld (Székely Land). The Székelys are a Hungarian subgroup— historically, they guarded the eastern border of the Kingdom of Hungary.

I had the pleasure of taking two lessons from Fazakas Levente, a musician based near Csíkszereda (Miercurea Ciuc). Levente is a founder of Heveder Banda and performs with Háromszék Táncegyüttes.

Levente is truly a well-rounded person— in addition to playing, when we were there he was working on building a cellar for butchering meat, among other projects. Each time we went to his house, he was preparing some sort of traditional food (including kocsonya, which he shared with us, pictured below). He even carved and built the Székely kapu (gate) in front of his house, saying it was his first attempt ever at carving. He’s interested in building violins, and knowing him, I’m sure he could do it.

He started studying classical music in a music school at the age of six, but didn’t feel motivated to learn music until the age of 14, when he started playing folk music with a friend who played bass. They started playing for dance groups. That was in 1993-1994. He said, “I started playing music when I started playing folk music”.

In those early years, he learned a lot from listening to cassettes and LPs. He said he listened to one recording for an entire year before trying to play it, and that when he tried to play it, he knew the recording so well that he could play every ornament perfectly. He thinks that listening to recordings and figuring out how to replicate the sounds is an important process for students. He said, “Learn exactly how it is in recordings. Then, play your own thing”.

In the lessons I took with him, we worked mostly on repertoire from Szászcsávás. I had the opportunity to observe myself as a student— particularly, as a student with intermediate-level knowledge of Transylvanian music (I started learning it three years ago, mainly from recordings), which helped me to get into the mindset of klezmer students who are at a similar level of familiarity with that style. There were many times when Levente would give me some piece of advice and I would immediately think “that’s exactly what I would tell klezmer students”— for example, that I should think about the rhythm that the brácsás and bassist will play while I’m playing the melody.

Some key take-aways from the lessons:

— Levente explained why many Transylvanian folk musicians play with a flat left-hand wrist: there are some ornaments which are actually easier to accomplish with this hand frame! This was the first time anyone had explained this to me.

— Levente also demonstrated an alternate bow hold with the thumb on the bottom of the bow and the pinky finger off of the side. He demonstrated how he can switch between this bow hold and a “classical” bow hold while playing.

— These demonstrations inspired me to start experimenting with a flat left hand frame, playing without a shoulder rest (also common among folk violinists here), and changing my bow hand. There’s certainly a learning curve to all of these adjustments but it’s interesting to see how the sound of the instrument changes with these different holds.

— Another earth-shaking discovery: he explained that there are 3 types of vibrato in Transylvanian music: 1.classical 2. vibrato trills 3.sliding vibrato. The sliding vibrato is an example of an ornament that is easier to produce with a flat left hand.

— He pointed out that I have a tendency to over-use the vibrato trill, when actually other types of vibrato are used— for example, when I played a piece from Szék (sliding vibrato is common in that repertoire). As a klezmer musician, it’s unsurprising that I would lean on this ornament so heavily, since it’s predominant in klezmer music.

— Levente is skilled at breaking down a piece into parts and teaching it methodically. He said “You have to give (students) blocks: endings, ornamentation, style”. He would clearly explain when he was teaching an ending of a phrase and when he was teaching a variation on a melody we had already covered. This helped me create a mental schema of the structure of the pieces as we went through them. It’s also something I think a lot about when I’m teaching.

— He uses many entertaining metaphors in his teaching, and has a deft use of humor as well : )

— He explained why it’s important that students are able to play melodies without ornamentation: because the same melodies can occur across multiple styles. He then demonstrated how a particular melody is played in ten different styles.

All of these observations just barely scratch the surface of what I learned from Levente! I hope to learn from him again sometime soon.

Szászcsávás: "Every song has a name"

I’m very excited to share this interview with Jámbor István “Dumnezeu”. He talks about his early training as a musician and his experience as a young, prodigious talent— he started his own band at the age of 13!

I’m very thankful to Dumnezeu for sharing his stories with us, to Fenyvesi Attila for his detailed translation, and to Gabe Zuckerberg for his thoughtful suggestions.

Updated version posted Dec 8, 2021

A note on language: Dumnezeu used the term “cigány”, which many people here in Eastern Europe would translate in English as “Gypsy”. However, in solidarity with activists and organizations working for Roma rights, I’m using the term “Roma” in this translation. You can read more about terminology here.