DRUMUL – Grigore Leşe

Grigore Leşe’s show “DRUMUL” (Romanian: “the road”), with the help of a true musical archeology, reconstructs through sound the archaic peasant’s road through life, with its leading passage moments – birth, marriage, military servive and death. Leşe’s road starts in the old days, when music was deeply ritualized, utilitary, and when man, when not singing in a group, sang to himself in solitude, in order to heal his soul.

“The Romanian peasant sings for himself, for relief; sings in church for glorifying God and for forgiveness of sins; sings the baby to sleep; sings to his bride to make her separation of unmarried life easier; sings to the dead so he makes peace with the world he’s leaving behind; carols at holydays; in a time of ceremonial initiation, of death and resurrection… This music does not develope but is transmitted like a mother language. I do not think (and I have proved it scientifically) that traditional music, transmitting itself as I have said before, was subject to interferences that were so violent that it turned into the so-called “folklore music”. Folklore is something else. Purged of the messages transmitted ceremonially, deprived by the improvisational caractheristic, brutally and trite accompanied, marked by outbursts of the soloists’ performing way, by the patternizing of kitsch lyrics, this folklore has a single purpose – a commercial one.” Grigore Leşe

Convinced that the defining mark of our civilization is pastoral, Grigore Leşe brings to attention sheep breeding specific instruments, in their rudimentary forms, whose sound calls upon loneliness, nostalgia, longing, feelings defining to Romanian spirituality, and also different versions of the Mioriţa ballad, with ancient texts, which are part of the universal style of initiation by separation and reintegration, death and symbolic resurrection.

On Leşe’s road, the singing is archaic, with throat modulations, and the traditional polyphony takes you to the origins. The show recreates a world with deep meanings about existence within rituals, about transcending tradition and restoring order in a world that still retains the memory of myth.
Grigore Leşe performed at PLAI with Doina Lavric and Zamfira Mureşan.

Performing:
Grigore Leşe – voice and traditional instruments
Doina Lavric – voice, cobză
Zamfira Mureşan – voice
Show concept: Grigore Leşe

Grigore Leşe’s show “DRUMUL” was supported by the Romanian Cultural Institute.