Cântecul Lui Barbu Lăutaru - Romanian Song

Barbu Lăutaru (born Vasile Barbu), born in 1780 and deceased in 1858, was a Romanian-speaking musician of Romani ethnicity. He was mostly active in the region of Basarabia, roughly equivalent to today’s country of Moldova. He is credited for being one of the forefathers of modern Romanian traditional music, and helped fuse Eastern, Western and Russian elements. The lyrics mention his significant decline in popularity after the “Westernisation“ of music in the area, which alludes to the fact that prior to the mid-19th century, Wallachian and Moldovan music tended to have much more affinity with Byzantine-Ottoman derived music, in other words more similar to Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian music as they still are today. Ironically, my arrangement is very much a post-19th century arrangement, and very Transylvanian-oriented, with emphasis on the țambal and very little Balkanic affectations in the instrumentation. A good version for simulating the sound of that region’s music in the time of Barbu would be Trei Parale’s version of this song. The lyrics mention his skills as a cobza player. The cobza is the lute seen in the image--once one of the main and principal instrument of Romanian music, it has now become much rarer in Romania and Moldova, having been completely supplanted by the țambal, especially in Transylvania, where it had much less of a presence than in Wallachia. The lyrics also mention boyars; aristocratic members of the feudal nobility of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. One of the main instruments I used in this piece is the “nai,“ the Romanian pan flute, which tends to be much less used than the “kaval,“ which is the more often heard flute in Romanian music.