Only some three months ago I was engaged in a debate on musical themes with several professionals, among whom composer Dan Dediu. He was telling us that he admired George Enescu?s Third Sonata for piano and violin (op. 26, written in 1925) as an outstanding masterpiece; that, nevertheless, he couldn?t help feeling somewhat irritated by the fact that its melodic pattern displayed too many extended seconds, probably more of them than actually existed in that fiddlers? music which the sonata seemed to take as its source of inspiration. I replied: ?I don?t think that Enescu charged it on purpose. It may be that at his time the extended seconds were more numerous than they are at present?? I don?t think that, at that moment, I was thinking of any valid argument that could support my view. But my answer, which sprang out unthinkingly, was a sign of the short-circuits that were starting to occur in my mind. If the discussion had gone on, Dan Dediu could have contradicted me by reminding us that Enescu?s Rhapsodies ? works of his adolescent years, written in 1899 (op. 11), whose melodies effectively quote musical sequences in a fiddler?s performance ? are definitely more diatonic (7); I would have probably reminded him too that those works had been written in a cultural climate that was bound to influence them ? at the time, Enescu was studying musical composition in Paris? But the discussion came to an end before any argument could be expressed. And I made a mental note, for further reflection, of the question of the high frequency of the extended seconds in the composer?s mature work and their absence in his early creations.

Finally, two months ago ? that is, in May 2001 ? I was managing a recording with a taraf of Botoşani, in the Peasant?s Museum. Its leader, Constantin Lupu, is 53. He is an excellent violinist and an enlightened former peasant, living now in town. He works as a musical specialist at the Botoşani Center for the Preservation of Tradition ? a fact which is not, in itself, necessarily a guarantee of his competence or superiority; quite the contrary. But Constantin Lupu is really very good. For some 30 years now, he has been traveling around the villages in his county, searching for undiscovered, old musical pieces, which are no longer currently played and may well disappear for good. (I will note, in a probably necessary aside, that George Enescu was born and spent the first years of his childhood in Liveni village, Botoşani county, and later became quite familiar with Dorohoi town, where his father lived for a while.) A passionate and tenacious man, Lupu managed to recuperate and restore to limited and probably temporary circulation a musical material which is relatively old ? since it was taken over from elderly people and is ignored by the succeeding generations ? and homogenous from a stylistic point of view. He worked with old people no one cared to remember, in places no one cared to go to, with tape recorders he does not like to remember. He knows where each and every piece comes from. He transcribed them all and included them in a collection of melodies recently published (Lupu, 1998). He can give admirable performances of them, probably even better that the musicians he learned them from. The boyar hora-s are well represented in Lupu?s repertoire.