I will come back now to the four narrative episodes I started with, ?pour faire le point?.

            In Vulpian?s time, the post-Phanariot pan-Balkan wave was starting to recede, yet kept some of its force, especially in the towns. Less than two decades later, though, Enescu?s rhapsodies stood up high on the crest of the subsequent wave, i.e. of the pan-European wave, of a mainly diatonic sort of musical expression. (The latter was probably very vigorously felt in big towns, but also in smaller towns, of the size of Costache Enescu?s Dorohoi.)

            At the same time, the village fiddlers of Bucovina, obviously lagging behind urban times, were still practicing a sort of music that was gradually vanishing from the big Romanian towns. At any rate, this is what Prof. Brandl seems to believe, and so do I. Actually, a period of 50 or 100 years does not mean much when it comes to a rural oral sort of music, especially at a time when cultural transformations were rather slow. Also, before taking refuge in the villages, the Phanariot music lingered for a while in the outskirts and fairs of the towns or in the smaller towns, thus giving the peasants a chance to become familiar with it. Enescu discovered it and explored its potential expressiveness in works he himself described ? for reasons I find perfectly legitimate ? as ?of a folk Romanian nature.?

            The Phanariot wave was, in a specific Moldavian manner, extremely slow in disintegrating at the periphery, so that Costică Lupu had the chance to witness its withdrawal and to carry its echoes on to the threshold of the 21^st century. His is, certainly, an artificial restoration. Yet I believe it is priceless, because it will be able to help future musicologists ? as it has me ? fill in the void spaces on a rather excessively fragmented historical-stylistic picture.

I will draw my argument to an end, on a prudent and slightly pessimistic note.

            Much has been written on the music of Oriental extraction or influence that circulated on the Romanian territory in the last centuries. But none of our contemporaries can claim that he or she knows what it really sounded like. The available information allows, of course, for a partial and imperfect imaginary reconstruction of it. For example: a presentation of the musical instruments of the time, to be found, for instance, in Tiberiu Alexandru (1980), is an indication of a general tone quality, but nothing more. Neither the psalm-like notations (as compiled by Anton Pann at the middle of the previous century) nor the European linear notations (such as Vulpian?s and his contemporaries?) can offer real guarantees of accuracy. They only approximate pitches and rhythms, while leaving out ? as necessarily well-known ? important stylistic details, which remain obscure to today?s musicians. As a matter of fact, the notations were not conceived as documents for the use of posterity, but as clues to help those willing to enrich their musical repertoires. The very selection of the melodies included in the collections of the time bore an ideological mark. Anton Pann was a man of the Balkans who was satisfied to be one, while Vulpian and the composers of his age were determined to make a point of the European orientation of their country. Opting some pieces in and some out, each of them negotiated the world of sounds function of their convictions, aspirations and esthetic criteria, which were, for the most part ? yet not altogether ? the others? too.