Vulpian?s scores survived the fierce selections to which I submitted my books several times in 20 years. At some point the boredom of still having them around made me donate them to the library of the Institute for Folklore. Yet not before going through them once again. I noticed that they included, as did the collections of the composers of the time, many ?boyar hora-s?, abundant with extended seconds ? which, as I learned in the know-it-all Conservatory, would lend an ?Oriental? note to a melody. The melodies were accompanied with harmonies of the 6/8 formula: ????. As an ethnomusicologist, I often wondered ? without ever finding a satisfactory answer ? why it was that the boyar hora-s ?? la mani?re de Vulpian? have become so rare in folk practice that I never chanced upon one while on the field, and only found a few in the historical recordings stock of the Archives of the Institute for Folklore. (3) I did find, though, the ţiitura of a boyar hora, since the lăutari still use it with their free rhythm (rubato) slow songs and doine. (I understood later that the metric-rhythmic formula 6/8???.. which the musicians used in their notations, is actually a deviation from the asymmetric formula 5/8???.. Although it inadequately reflects the rhythmic reality it denotes, the former formula is still used by less professional folklorists and by the directors of folk music bands.) The transcriptions of dance melodies I ever did or which I deciphered from trustworthy publications and from archive collections, have, irrespective of the moment when they were put down on paper ? which cannot be prior to 1907 (4) ? a mainly diatonic melodic profile, and so a rather ?European? cast. The more intensely chromatic pieces are, for the most part, big highland hora-s, to which the peasants dance especially at weddings. (5) I heard some of my folklorist colleagues call them Gypsy hora-s, but I have not found any serious documented indication that they were sung exclusively for, or by, Gypsy people. At any rate, judging by Vulpian?s and his contemporaries? scores ? which I studied eventually ? the 20^th-century dances have a much more overt diatonic melodic shape than those of the middle and end of the 19^th century. And their tonal-harmonic harmonization definitely place them with the sound patterns of the West.

Seven or eight years ago, I was at a conference in Berlin dedicated to Roma music (more exactly, to the music of the Roma and Sinti people); together with Prof. Rudolf Maria Brandl ? an authority on post-medieval and modern Greek music ? I was listening to recordings of Greek and Moldavian fiddlers? music. The Moldavian pieces were composed in a rather unusual style, with relatively archaic undertones and unambiguous ?Oriental? connotations. After the hearing, he asked me for a copy of that recording and commented (I quote from memory): ?I have always been of the opinion that whoever wants to study Phanariot music needs to pay closer attention to the music of today?s Romanian lăutari.? I recalled then the anthologies of Greek and Turkish songs, or songs composed in that manner, that circulated in psalm-like notation in the Romanian Principalities as early as the first part of the 19^th century (6); Anton Pann?s famous Spitalul amorului (?The Hospital of Love?) (Pann, 1850); the Gypsy lăutari from the Romanian Principalities who sang in Istanbul sometime around 1800 (Alexandru, 1908, p. 267) and other facts and documents, which, considered together, supported with historical proofs Prof. Brandl?s conjecture.