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The Romanian Doina

by

Robert Garfias

The Romanian Doina

The folk song type known as doina is widespread throughout most of Romania. It may be related to and may even have its origins in the cintec de leagan, or lullaby. In order to better comprehend the vast number of variants which exist in Romania under the general name, doina, I compiled a short taxonomy of all the recorded doine in my collection, including my original field tapes recorded there in 1977.This is therefore, neither a complete list of all known doinas nor even of all existing doina types. Since the collection is quite extensive, however, I am confident that this taxonomy gives a view of the great majority of Doina types.

The Doina is always sung in free rhythm with varying degrees of embellishment and melisma. There are a number of tune types used for these semi-improvised performances of the doina. In this listing I have used the Romanian names for the type or sub type as given by the performer, but at times I added my own observed description of the type based on similarity with others in the same category. The items in the list are each numbered according to the order of accession and thus the number is meaningless other than serving as a means of identifying each individual record. Many examples appear only with the type given as doina. Others have further descriptions based on origin, intent, tune type or function. For further clarification, I have added here, an unpublished article I wrote on the relationship of the Doine to Romanian urban popular music. Included in this listing are the locations of the recordings. The major cultural regions of Romania are Muntentia, Oltenia, Moldavia, Dobroghea, Banat and Transylvania. During the period of my research in Romania, it was not permitted to mention the names of these cultural and geographic regions, nor to describe their boundaries. This was perhaps out of fear of encroachment from Romania's neighbors. The major traditional cultural regions are indicated in the map. The country was divided into smaller regions, like counties, and these were known as judet. The name of the judet as well as the town or city or origin are also given where ever known.

The Development of the Romanian Urban Gypsy Song Form
There is no other form of musical expression which in the minds of the general population of the Socialist Republic of Romania conjures up so clearly the essence of all its music, and, indeed, the best of the entire artistic expression of the culture as does the doina. This free lyrical song form is widespread in the folk traditions of many regions of the country where it remains strong. It is also a mainstay of all performances by the new style State Folk Music and Dance Ensembles of Romania as well as being regularly played by bands of professional musicians, largely made up of Gypsies, and even frequently used by Romanian composers using the Western European Classical tradition.
It is difficult to imagine how a form which so completely permeates the fabric of Romanian cultural life could be anything but from an authochthonous Romanian tradition. Yet there is much to indicate that this, at least in part, may be the case, in spite of the fact that it is particularly difficult to defend this idea in the context of current Romanian official policy which disallows the possibility of foreign influence in Romanian culture.

Certain other Romanian folk forms, generically related in style to the doina, bear more clearly documentable traces of Turkish influence. There are three such folk music forms which both show close parallels to the doina and also show clear Turkish traces. These three forms are the cîntec batrînesc, the bocet and the shepherd's flute genre piece, cînd ciobanu s-i a pierdut oile. Each of these forms is interpreted in a free rhythmic style with a high degree of ornamentation which, although distinctive, also closely parallels the style of doina interpretation. Romanian scholars point out that the difference between the doina and the ballad, or cîntec batrînesc is minimal and entirely based on a distinction between a lyric form one the one hand and an epic or narrative on the other. Furthermore the close stylistic relationship between the doina and the bocet - a form of lament which is sung while expressing real grief in tears - as well as other folk vocal forms in free rhythm is generally recognized.
The epic ballads, cîntec batrîneste are generally performed today by Gypsy minstrels, lãutari, and in their performances usually precede the singing of the ballad by the performance of an instrumental tachsim. In this case both the term as well as the musical practice are clearly borrowed from Turkish musical practice. The bocet shows such sharp parallels to other highly stylized musical forms of personal expressions of grief found throughout the Islamic world that one is prepared to accept that this form also has in origins in Turkish practice. It is true however, that the broad spread of the bocet throughout Romania and its numerous variant forms as well as its integration into the traditional important life cycle observances lends strength to the argument that this lament may as well be a Romanian tradition. The shepherd's flute music consists of a long suite of instrumental compositions played on the shepherd's flute, caval. The compositions are highly programmatic in content, the most frequently encountered being the story of the "Shepherd who has lost his sheep", cînd ciobanu s-i a pierdut oile. In the this instance both the instrument, the caval as well as the practice of performing instrumental music of a programmatic character are clearly related to Turkish shepherd's traditions. Here as in the previous examples, modern Romanian scholars currently avoid direct reference to Turkish culture choosing instead, if they must, to refer to a more general "Oriental" influence, or to Persian-Arabic, notwithstanding historical evidence which indicates over a hundred years of predominant Turkish and Fanariot Greek cultural and political influence.

The doina survives in Romania today as a very widespread folk form. It appears most frequently in the regions of Moldavia, Muntenia and Dobrogea. Distinctive regional differences can be noted in different areas of the country. In the Maramures, region of Northern Transylvania there is a song form called hora lunga, horea lunga, or cîntec lung, all meaning "long song" and referring to a song form clearly related to the doina. In this instance the word hora does not refer to the well-known dance form hora, which word comes into Romanian probably from Bulgarian (horo). The hora lunga of Maramures derives instead from horea, the Romanian word meaning "oration".

Since the doina is an expressive song form in free rhythm, highly ornamented and one which offers the singer great scope for individual expression, the possibilities for influence from other music styles is great. Although the doina as it is performed today is distinctively Romanian in character, it is significant that the area in which it survives today, with the exception of Maramures, represents that part of Romania in which the Turkish influence was strongest. Some Romanian scholars suggest that the doina may have its origins in the cîntec de leagan, or lullaby. While there is some merit to this argument it is also true that the cîntec de leagan , being also a free form performed in personal and unstructured context may have equally been influenced by the doina itself.

A more significant argument is raised by the Romanian musicologist, Gheorghe Ciobanu, who notes that there are notable parallels between the Muntenian doina of the subcarpathian region and that of the hora lunga of Maramures,, from which he infers the possibility that the form of the doina may originate in a very ancient Daco-Thracian strata dating back to a time when the tribes of what is now the North and South of Romania were united. Thus we have several possibilities, that the doina was, in fact, an ancient expressive form of the earliest Romanians and has remained so, that the above is true but that the form has been subjected to various influences since that time including some which are of unmistakable Turkish character, or finally, that the form is one borrowed from Turkish models.

While the actual origins of the doina remain of necessity unclear, a certain amount of Turkish influence is evident and undeniable in spite of the current Romanian policy which denies it. This influence is most noticeable in the use of tonal systems which are related to the system of Turkish makams as well as in the character of the minute melodic ornametations which identify the doina. In actuality, the term doina includes a number of subtypes, the hora lunga of Maramures, being one of the most distinctive. In addition there are other variant types called haiducesti, de codru, de jale and ca pe lunca, for example.

Of these the type, ca pe lunca is of particular interest. As it name implies it is a form associated with the Danube plains region - from the word lunca, meaning the plains. The region thus identified includes the Danube regions of the provinces (judet,) of Dobrogea, Muntenia and Oltenia. This special form of the doina has an expressive quality and a particular melodic style which is generally associated with the performances by Gypsy musicians from that region. While the melody of the ca pe lunca is characteristically in free rhythm, its accompaniment can be in the slow halting pattern of the Danubian plains schioapa, or in a fast even pulse which allows the melody to float freely. It is significant that also from this same region comes another form, the cîntec de dragoste, or doina de dragoste. This is recognized as a newer and somewhat more popular form derived from the doina of Muntenia and Oltenia.

The cîntec de dragoste is a song in free rhythm with a high degree of ornamentation, like the doina itself. Coming from the region of the country in which Gypsy musicians particularly dominate in providing music and consequently influencing local popular styles, the cîntec de dragoste, or "song of longing" manifests many of the stylistic and expressive characteristics of the music of the Gypsies of the area. While the doina itself regularly deals with the subject of love and longing in its texts, in the cîntec de dragoste this becomes the identifying focus of all the songs in the genre. The emphasis is on a somewhat more direct and lighter level of expression than is common with the doina. Its appeal is considered much more immediate than the more rustic yet often more profound doina. One other distinctive characteristic of the cîntec de dragoste is that it is usually accompanied by an instrumental ensemble and its accompaniment is set in a fixed regular rhythm, in spite of the fact that the melodic line itself, that is, the vocal or instrumental setting of the melody, remains in the free rhythmic style of the doina.

Coming from the lower Danube plains area of Romania and being recognized as a more modern and popular form of the doina it was perhaps only natural that the cîntec de dragoste should have been influenced by current fashion. Usually performed by professional Gypsy musicians who already possessed the strength of what remained of the Turkish musical tradition in Romania, the flavor of the Turkish makam system was imprinted on these songs along with the highly expressive and personal style of Gypsy interpretation.

During the last years of the 19th Century and the early years of the present new popular music forms were developing in the cities of Romania, particularly those in Muntenia and Oltenia, such as Bucuresti and Craiova. In these larger urban centers a new type of popular culture was evolving one which drew from the Greek, Turkish and Armenian popular traditions of many of the most recent inhabitants but then mixed with elements of popularized Romanian sources such as the cîntec de dragoste. Meanwhile as Gypsies were finally liberated from their status as slaves, many migrated to these larger cities and settled in small enclaves surrounding the cites known collectively as mahale. In these mahalale (plural) new variant forms of the current urban popular styles also evolved.

While the cîntec de dragoste greatly influenced the evolution of new popular song in Romania, it was also one of the very important influences on the newly evolving song of the Gypsy mahalale. Like the cîntec de dragoste, these urban Gypsy songs appeared to have been based first on doina like vocal lines in free ornamented structure with a fixed rhythmic accompaniment provided by a small band of Gypsy musicians, usually called a taraf in Romanian. This urban Gypsy style of song came to be known by many names, cîntec de petrecere, "songs of pleasure', cîntec de pahar, "songs of the cup", or "drinking songs", and cîntec de mahala, "songs of the Gypsy enclaves", the word implying something of the sense of slums with just a hint of Romantic nostalgia. This genre is also sometimes referred to as cîntec tiganeste or "Gypsy song". However, under recent Romanian State policy the word Gypsy was forbidden - officially there were no Gypsies in Romania, although there are officially recognized groups of Saxons, Swabians and Hungarians - so in any document approved by the State, even for example, a record jacket, the term Gypsy is avoided. It is interesting that neither the sizable communities of Turks and Tatars nor even the Jews living in Romania were recognized either.

The cîntec de pahar, to use the most frequently used of the current possible terms for the urban Gypsy song, continued to evolve in the Romanian cities and appears to have expanded to include vocal settings of Gypsy dance forms like the hora and eventually to also include vocal setting of other forms of Romanian music as well as a few foreign songs. Although songs originating outside of the doina-cîntec de dragoste style do certainly exist within the scope of the modern cîntec de pahar, what is not clear is to what degree they may have been a part of the earliest evolution of this style around the beginning of the present century. From a historical evolutionary sense it seems much neater to think of the doina-cîntec de dragoste as the line of first evolution from which other parameters of the genre were later added, but this is not yet possible to determine.

There are significant stylistic differences between the cîntec de pahar and the cîntec de dragoste genres notwithstanding the fact that the two genres are often blurred in particular when they are performed by the same Gypsy musicians. The most immediately noticeable characteristic is the presence of melodic types more closely akin to the makam system of Turkey in the cîntec de pahar. The proximity of the Gypsy creators of this style as well as their audiences to the more strongly Turkish/Greek strains of the big cities, in large part, explains this. In addition, however, the cîntec de dragoste has a distinctively light popular, more easily accessible quality when compared to the cîntec de pahar. By contrast the mood and style of the cîntec de pahar seems more personal, deeper in its range of expression and to bear a closer affinity to the doina itself in its character.

One important characteristic of performance used by urban Gypsy singers in Romania is the choice of a thin light voice quality which permits graceful maneuvering of the delicate ornamentation of the melody so much preferred by them. This thin mellifluous voice quality does not, perhaps, strike one as necessarily Turkish upon first hearing. Today the most famous exponents of the urban Gypsy singing style are females, Gaby Lunca and Romica Puceanu being the most widely appreciated. However, until just a few years ago there were male Gypsy singers who used their voices in this same thin high pitched style, something for which there is no known precedent in Romanian folk music and yet something not unusual in old Greek-Turkish popular music. The most famous of the singers in this style being the celebrated nai player, Fanica Luca, and the late Siminica. Male Gypsy singers would employ this technique whether they were singing cîntec de dragoste or cîntec de pahar while also employing in both styles, an ornamentation style strongly tinged with the Greek-Turkish popular flavor.

In the performance of the cîntec de pahar as with the cîntec de dragoste the accompanying ensemble supports the free, lyric melody with the fixed and regular quadruple pattern of the Gypsy style hora. Over this the vocal melody seems to float, yet so clear and firm is the rhythmic accompaniment that it is only by listening carefully that one notices that the total number of measures in any phrase is likely to be irregular and that there at each return of the melody in any performance, the number of measures required for each phrase may vary greatly. the number of measures during which the accompaniment continues to sustain any particular harmony is determined by how long the singer decides to hold the particular pitch which is being harmonized. The unit of time by which this adjustment between the free vocal and the fixed accompaniment are added is the measure.

Although there is no particular name use to denote the distinction, the cîntec de pahar actually fall into three distinct types. In all of these three types the vocal melody is in various degrees of free rhythm over a fixed rhythmic accompaniment. Type one resembles the cîntec de dragoste with its more lyrical clear melodic contour. This type tends be set with slower tempos in the accompaniment and could be described as an urban Gypsy form of the popular Romanian cîntec de dragoste.

Type two resembles type one in its general similarity to the cîntec de dragoste, that is in its use of slower tempos under the free melodic line of the voice. Type two however is characterized by the use of a special rhythm in the accompaniment called tiitura de of. In this case, it is actually identified as such by the musicians who provide this accompaniment. This name derives from the word of, used frequently as an exclamation in songs of this type to express grief or longing. Among the Gypsy audiences of Romania, particularly in the larger cities, the distinctively staggered rhythms of the cîntec de pahar set in type two are the most popular and most frequently heard also in instrumental settings.

The third type of cîntec de pahar uses a fast tempo of accompaniment under a highly ornamented melodic line which is closer to the folk doina in character but with distinctive urban Gypsy melodic tendencies. In this type, the generally fast tempo of the accompanying harmonic structure minimizes the disruption which might otherwise occur between voice and accompaniment.

As one listens to these three types of Gypsy song it is only gradually that one becomes aware that the melody is really a free doina and the fixed rhythm of the accompaniment is free in relation to the melody line. Yet the fixed rhythm contains the harmonic element which supports and delineates the melody of the vocal line. Since the singer is free to extend any note as long as needed for the balance of the overall phrase, the number of measures during which the harmony must continue varies accordingly. Thus this form is identified by a relationship between the melody and the accompaniment which is at the same time both free and fixed.

Thus the roots of these forms of Romanian urban Gypsy song are mixed with elements of Romanian folk Doina and then overlaid with various popular urban stylistic elements, notable among these are the Greek and Turkish. As a style which is strongly Romanian in its fundamental form and character, nonetheless in its incorporation of such foreign elements as were popular during the period of its development, these forms of the cîntec de pahar also represent what may be at the limits of the furthest cultural outreach of Ottoman Turkish cultural influence.

Robert Garfias

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