The Romanian Doina

A Romanian peasant girl (1874)by Nicolae Grigorescu

 

The folk song type known as doina is widespread throughout most of Romania. It may be related to and may even have its origins in the cintec de leagan, or lullaby. In order to better comprehend the vast number of variants which exist in Romania under the general name, doina, I compiled a short taxonomy of all the recorded doine in my collection, including my original field tapes recorded there in 1977.This is therefore, neither a complete list of all known doinas nor even of all existing doina types. Since the collection is quite extensive, however, I am confident that this taxonomy gives a view of the great majority of Doina types.

The Doina is always sung in free rhythm with varying degrees of embellishment and melisma.There are a number of tune types used for these semi-im

provised performances of the doina. In this listing I have used the Romanian names for the type or sub type as given by the peformer, but at times I added my own observed description of the type based on similarity with others in the same category.The items in the list are each numbered according to the order of accession and thus the number is meaningless other than serving as a means of identifying each individual record. Many examples appear only with the type given as doina. Others have further descriptions based on origin, intent, tune type or function. For further clarification, I have added here, an unpublished article I wrote on the relationship of the Doine to Romanian urban popular music.

 

Included in this listing are the locations of the recordings. The major cultural regions of Romania are Muntentia, Oltenia, Moldavia, Dobroghea, Banat and Transylvania. During the period of my research in Romania, it was not permitted to mention the names of these cultural and geographic regions, nor to describe their boundries. This was perhps out of fear of encroachment from Romania's neighbors. The major traditional cultural regions are indicated in the map.The country was divided into smaller regions, like counties, and these were known as judet. The name of the judet as well as the town or city or origin are also given where ever known.

Robert Garfias
Anthropology
UCI

 

The Romanian Doina

Go to the complete list of Doinas

Go to the article on urban popular music and the Doina

Go to a short glossary of Doina types

Go to recorded examples of some Doina types

Go to a map showing cultural regions of Romania

rgarfias@uci.edu
last updated 4.16.04