Winter customs
I’ve just returned from the yearly ‘winter party’ held in honor of the teachers by each promotion’s graduates. It consists in an adaptation of the traditional apotropaic ‘wishings’, a Romanian custom marked by lack of grace and, very often, lack of intelligence.
The habit in my school is to write several programmatic and perfunctorily humorous poems for each teacher, following the model of the classical popular poems, such as ‘The Little Plough’. In some odd way, the writers seem to lack rhythm badly, given the fact that the metrical pattern is harshly violented.
Naturally the majority of ‘performers’ are dressed up in popular outfits, but the rest create a very peculiar dissonance. Every 10 verses a prolonged ‘Hăăăăăi’ echoes, overdubbing the obnoxious sound of the ‘buhai’, an autochthone masterpiece of an instrument.
I have nothing against the show I have just watched. It is a recrudescence of tradition. What is truly a marvel of brutality is the way our winter customs (besides carolling) take place. Meaningless shouts, grunts, brusk movements, melody-lacking songs, annoying rhythms, hideous masks. All under the auspices of ‘I was born amidst these traditions’. No-one knows exactly what they mean anymore, but the aforementioned statement acts as a perfect motivation.
As for the ‘buhai’, it makes a perfect couple with the ‘zongoră’. Both are peaks of Romanian music. Since Paganini managed to play a concert on a one-string violin, why not give ourselves a shot? Thus the ‘buhai’ was born, the one-roped instrument. You can use a series of tunings for it, starting with dropped C, E flat, E straight and ending with the tuning in Noise major, most oftenly used. The ‘zongoră’… Now that’s art. The Spaniards took the guitar and turned it into the flamenco guitar, which puts those frets on fire. Yngwie Malmsteen made the guitar play more notes than one can hear. But can this stand comparison to what this glorious Romanian nation made out of the guitar? Naturally it can’t. Put it upwards, in an impossible position, where you can merely grasp an accord, now that’s virtuosity.
Am I evil? Yes I am…
