1.3. Recording in Zece Prăjini
Between 1999 and 2011, I travelled regularly from Paris to Romania in order to experience and try to understand how music was performed in rural areas and popular urban neighborhoods. I visited Romanian and Rom musicians, but in the end I carried out most of my research with the latter. I was particularly interested in the music that was performed at large parties (as opposed to the intimate domestic space or the “folkloric” ensembles that performed on stage and in the media). The musicians hired on those occasions deserve a special name: lăutari in Romanian (başabghiarea in Rom). Most lăutari identify themselves as belonging to the Rom minority. In this paper I will refer primarily to my fieldwork between 2001 and 2008 in the village of Zece Prăjini (district of Dagâţa, near the town of Roman).
By the early 2000s, Gadjo Dilo had been seen by many Romanian people in Romania, Rom included. In more than one Rom neighborhood, it became a kind of blueprint for subsequent encounters with foreign Gadje (i.e. non-Rom people). Ethnomusicologists and filmmakers were designated targets for jokes (or half-jokes) that compared them to Stéphane, the main Gadjo in the film (cf. Larcher 2018: 394; Bonini-Baraldi 2020). Unlike Stéphane, I had a good command of Romanian when I first arrived in Zece Prăjini. Nevertheless, the fact that I was a French citizen and a student at a French university gave rise to more than one joke. I would have liked the analogy to the film to hold as well when I was recording. My initial expectations were that, in a Rom village where many good musicians lived, it should be easy to record live music that would reflect the life of the community. But my Rom friends had radically different views of this.
For them, the recordings that best represented them had to be clean and well arranged. The designated place for a “proper” recording was a music studio, like the one that Doru (a Romanian Gadjo) ran in the nearby town of Roman. Most lăutari in the area recorded there on occasion. The recordings were sold locally at very cheap prices, and the musicians received hardly any payment for them. Professional musicians considered these recordings advertisements for their skills. They earned a living by performing, either at large parties like weddings or village fairs, or nightly in pubs and restaurants. Advertisements need not convey reality, of course. There was a significant difference between what the musicians played in the studio and on the job. Many mixing artefacts were allowed: cuts, inserts, playbacks, overlaying the same instrument several times (to give it more presence), or speeding up the final mix (to give it more punch). Neither the musicians nor the studio owner described these as ways to fool the listener. The recording studio merely afforded ways to enhance the music and make it sound “nicer” and “catchier.” Those judgements emanated primarily from the musicians themselves.
Indeed, for their live performances as well as for their recordings, professional Rom musicians abided by an aesthetic where “tricks” (şmecherii) were a synonym for mastery, virtuosity, and, ideally, pleasure for the listener (Stoichiţă 2008, 2013b). They proudly described themselves as craftsmen in the art of manipulating other people’s emotions through sound. For them, music was a “technology of enchantment” (Gell 1988; 1992), and studio recordings merely added a few more “tricks.” The record was intended to hook the listener’s ear and convince them to dial the number on the back cover. This was music as the lăutari wanted it to sound. For me, it was also meaningful as a field recording, in the sense that it represented something fundamental about how these people related to music.
However, I much preferred their “live” performances.
As these performances were underdocumented, I recorded dozens of hours of them, especially at large wedding parties. At first, I set out to record the music. But the venues were large, the music resonated, and many other acoustic events happened concurrently (people talked, kids played, dancers yelled, church bells rang, etc.). I realized that “music” was just one part of what the average listener got to hear, and I wanted my recordings to represent that whole. To record “acoustic” ensembles like brass bands, I obviously had to use microphones, but I chose to use them to record amplified ensembles as well. Sometimes the musicians also recorded the same performances, but in a radically different way: they fed the mixer’s output straight to their recording devices. To their ears, this only had advantages: no audience, no distortion from the loudspeakers, no room acoustics, just the “pure” sound of the music. On those occasions, my friends really did not understand why I bothered to place microphones scattered about, only to worry later about drunken guests trampling on them.
Even when they came straight out of the mixer, live recordings were rarely satisfactory for my friends: too many imponderables. When they wanted a “proper” recording of the latest tune they were playing, but the town studio seemed too far away, they asked me to do it. The chosen place for that was a quiet room or a remote backyard. Again, they made sure that no annoying audience would interfere. We often recorded several takes until they were satisfied. Differences in the retakes were due to small errors, never to “improvisation” (a word which had negative connotations for them). Once the take was satisfactory, I was asked to add some reverb, typically a “plate” reverb with a long audible tail. To my friends, this “opened” up the sound (Stoichiţă 2013a). These recordings were meant to illustrate my friends’ repertoire and playing skills. In the long run, however, I realized that the musicians were hardly ever proud of them, and their circulation stopped fairly quickly. I was also unsatisfied, albeit perhaps for different reasons. The sessions were more or less “dialogic” (Feld 1987), but in our case, that only meant that the result reflected neither their expectations nor mine.
From my fieldwork, then, I brought many kinds of recordings. Some strive to reflect music “as it happened”; some strive to reflect music as it “should” happen (according to the musicians); some strive to strike a balance between both; and some strive to reflect the soundscape of a party as one might experience it. Any of these could be termed a “field” recording, by one standard or another. But many, in the end, also “failed,” because they do not actually convey what they were supposed to. With this as the background, let’s return to the question at the core of this paper.
“Sârba lui Foflează” by Fanfara Shukar from Zece Prăjini. Recorded and mixed at Studio Alidor in the nearby town of Roman. Released on the album Fanfara Speranţa, vol. 3.
“Sârba lui Foflează” by Fanfara Shukar from Zece Prăjini. Played live at a village fair in Buruieneşti. Recorded by me in close proximity to the musicians.
Marius Panţiru (sax) plays a sârbă dance live in Zece Prăjini. He is accompanied by his uncle Cipi on the organ and his neighbor Dusik on the drums. The band plays at the margin of a large open field. I stand on the opposite side, beyond a small road that runs along the field. The distance is roughly 200 meters between the loudspeakers and the stereo microphone. Occasionally I move the microphone slightly to the right and to the left.