His cobza-player, Costică ???, aged 73, accompanies him, just as he used to when they were young, with three-sound harmonies invested with the classic tonal functions: tonic, dominant, under-dominant. The cobza-player told me that his father, a village violinist who, sometime at the beginning of the 20^th century (that is, shortly after the time of Enescu?s debut as a composer), he was already playing a whole lot of boyar hora-s. It was not only the source of Costică Lupu?s songs that pleaded for their old age, but their structural details too ? I?m saying that, well aware of how hazardous such a statement can be. Some of them reminded me of the Greek pieces I had listened to together with Prof. Brandl. Some others put me in mind of D. Vulpian?s dusty scores. Finally, some made me think of the kletzmer music, which I have much listened to in the last decade on records and tapes. (The kletzmer music of the Eastern Jews, shaped along several centuries in a wide geographical space that includes the Balkans, is now heavily promoted by all American and European music companies.) The melodies with kletzmer influences surprised me on the very first hearing. The mystery was soon dispelled, though, when Lupu told me that the villages where he collected them - ????.. ? had sheltered, up to a point, large Jewish communities. (8) But there may be another explanation to those songs? Jewish outline. The whole Northern Moldavia was populated with numerous and compact groups of Jews up until the eve of WWII. Constantinople too had its own Jewish minority, with its professional musicians who could skillfully play Jewish music as well as all the other types of music practiced in the metropolis. Some of them even came to the Romanian Principalities early on, where they would play in front of the boyars lazily reclining on their sofas the same sort of music that was being played for the Sublime Porte. On the other hand, there were the best lăutari in the Romanian Principalities, who used to travel, even in the 18^th century if not earlier, to Istanbul, where they could learn all the tunes that might please the ears of their clients there and at home, so Jewish pieces included ? by the side of Turkish, Greek and Persian music (Alexandru, p. 267). At any event, Costică Lupu?s music had a Balkan flavor which, I thought, came out of the mixture of south-eastern elements (Greek, Jewish and, probably, Turkish) it incorporated. A mixture kept together, though, by a healthy local substance: his music never ceased to be mainly, and recognizably, Romanian.

The events I have recounted here called one another in my memory, urged me to reflect on the issues they raised, propelled me to resume the reading of several books I had long forgotten and suggested to me several observations and assumptions.

            In the 16^th-19^th centuries, the music played at the Romanian noble courts ? the princely courts included ? was feeding on two sources. The first source, probably considered to be the superior of the two, enriched it with Turkish, Greek, Persian, Jewish and other musical styles and pieces, which made the fashion in the multiethnic and cosmopolitan Tzarigrad, yet were also circulated across the whole south-eastern European area. The second source, of folk extraction, refreshed its reservoir of dance melodies, doine and songs with pieces originating in the rural milieu and/or in the mahala (outskirts). The circulation of the melodies and related styles was nevertheless multi-directional: from top to bottom, and from bottom to top, that is, from the high level to the base, and the other way round, and from the center to the peripheries and back. It is doubtless that the two musical strata of distinct extraction ? local and, respectively, Balkan ? were, because practiced by the same performers, mutually contaminated.