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Zorile.
Appendix Two from Dawn Songs
Dawn Songs consists of three essays on music. A short one on Derek Bailey as heard in 1970; a moderate-size one on surviving west gallery choral pieces performed in pubs of the Sheffield Moorlands area at Christmas, called ‘Mass Lyric’; and ‘Dawn Songs’ itself, which concerns zorile, a lamentational genre of Transylvanian village music, and forms the bulk of the book.
by PETER RILEY.
THERE IS ANOTHER1 structure, which survives, or did, recently enough to be documented,2 among Romanians further south.3 In the village there will be a group of women, normally three, sometimes more, who are called upon to sing at funerals and during the period of lying-in before them. This function with its texts and its melodies, is passed on to younger women one at a time so that there will always be the same number. They are called Zorile, the vocative form of the Romanian for ‘dawn’ which is a plural noun; they are the singers to the dawn(s). They arrive at dawn on each of the three days normally appointed between death and burial and sing in the yard facing the rising sun, then enter the house and sing facing the open coffin, holding candles. On the fourth day they sing again at several points of the funeral procession, and finally at the graveside as the closed coffin is sunk, and the earth thrown noisily onto it.4 Their function is parallel to that of the priest, and they are paid on the same terms as he. The songs they sing are not personal and not improvised; neither are they laments or dirges. They are to be sung “cu glas fârâ durere” — in a voice without sorrow — and they must not be sung by close relatives of the deceased. They are ceremonial songs concerning observance and the meaning of death. Their texts are rich in active imagery and are said to be some of the most archaic European texts known. The music5 bears a harsh beauty, something beyond the ancestral, something as modernist as the dawn-song. This6 is one of the songs they sang at dawn in Dobrița, Oltenia:
This is in fact a kind of modern compendial version (by the village in question) of the Zorile form, which abbreviates and substitutes for a whole set of funeral songs with distinct content and function. There are Zorile din casă (in the house), Zorile din afară (outside), de fereastra (at the window), al luminarilor (of the candles) and several emphasising particular figures of the poems – of the fairies, of the road, of the departure, of the rose-bush… There are also, paradoxically, Zorile subtitled la amiazi at noon, and de seara in the evening.
The song sung at dawn with the candles is the first of these, and is basically a preludial address to the dawn personified as fairies or siblings (being plural), begging that daybreak should be delayed until dalbul de pribeag – the pale wanderer, the deceased – finishes a long journey he or she must undertake. This undoubtedly connects to the wedding candle-song, which delays the departure of the bride with a solemn dance round her by her female peers holding candles, while her hair is being bound up into the sign of maturity.
The next is “The Dead Person’s Song”, sung at the coffin, which dramatizes the dead person speaking of the experience of death as inanimation and invasion (the black crow etc.) and thus excusing the inability to thank and greet friends relatives and neighbours as they arrive.
The most important song, “The Song of the Journey”, originally sung during the funeral journey itself, is the one that urges and instructs the dead to set out on their journey and gives directions. I quote entire here Alexandru’s summary of such a song–-
And there are others: at the grave, at the burial… which continue and extend this treatment of death as a new life. An entire theatre is constructed in these songs offering a post-mortem landscape combining the familiar, the mysterious, and the paradisal, relenting of nature (as long as you keep ‘to the right’ or ‘straight on’) and the grave itself is finally depicted as a house with little windows through which light and fruit will come. Such posthumous spirit-journey narratives could well lie behind all the inflated Transylvanian stuff about vampires and were-wolves.
This death journey takes us far from the dawn song, even if departure is one of the dawn song’s commonest narratives. And the music is very different from that of either the dawn song or the lament, except that a falling line is common in the latter.12 But in the appeal in many dawn songs to an obdurate “God” (and Mother) who sometimes seems more bonded to physical earthly necessity even than Zeus, some kind of faint echo might be felt of the address to the dawn on behalf of the dead, which begs the ever-new light to guide the victim of earth through the labyrinth. In that case, in the dawn-song’s modernity, the transport through Hades is reinstated on earth as a figure of necessity, the shadow of personal and social fate.13
♦
Peter Riley, the poetry editor of The Fortnightly Review‘s New Series, is a former editor of Collection, and the author of fifteen books of poetry (including The Glacial Stairway [Carcanet, 2011]) – and some of prose. He lives in Yorkshire and is the recipient of a 2012 Cholmondeley Award for poetry.
Peter Riley’s latest books are Pennine Tales and Hushings (both from Calder Valley Poetry) and Dawn Songs (Shearsman, 2017), from which this short essay is taken. His Due North (Shearsman), a book-length poem, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, 2015, and a collection of his ‘Poetry Notes’ columns has been collected in The Fortnightly Reviews: Poetry Notes 2012-2014, and published in 2015 by Odd Volumes, our imprint. An archive of his Fortnightly columns is here.
CONSULTED TEXTS:
Alexandru, Tiberiu, Romanian Folk Music. Bucharest 1980
Brailoiu, Problems of Ethnomusicology. 1984
—–, La plainte funèbre du village de Dragus. n.p., n.d.
Cuisenier, Jean, Le feu vivant: La paranté et ses rituals dans les Carpates. Paris 1994.
NOTES:
Compare a Romanian song from Ieud, Maramureș, described as a ‘march’ and which could be used as a love song or a recruitment song –
The road I’ve set out on is long_______Drumu-i lung, pa el ma duc, ma.
I will never reach the end. long_______Capâtu nu i-l ajung mâ
If I get there ach the end. l.ong_____ __De-as ajunge capâtu’, mâ
I can shake hands with the cuckoo,____Dau-as mîna cu cucu. mâ
But not with you, my dear. cuckoo,____Si cu tîne mîndrâ, ne, mâ
I can shake hands with the thrush,_____Dau-as mîna cu mierla. mâ
But not with you, my dear. cuckoo,____Si cu tîne mîndrâ, ba’, mâ. ↩
Fire, fire, trandafire, …………Bud, bud, rosebud
Dar to ce te-ai zabovit____.__ Why did you wait so long
Si n-ai înflorit?………..____.. Before you opened?
These could be interventions of parts of lyrical songs into the Zorile text, but the theme, ‘If I had known (about life/ about death) I would not have grown and ripened’ is also present in texts of The Song of the Pine (Cintecul Bradului or just Bradul) . This is another funeral ceremony song sung (by the Zorile?– this is not clear) only at funerals of the young unwedded, when a small decorated but defoliated pine tree is set up at the head of the grave, as it was the custom to set up just such a tree at the gate of the new house when a couple got married, thus a “death-wedding” element. The song speaks in the voice of the pine tree, which laments the use to which it has been put – ‘If I had known / I’d never have risen / If I’d been aware / I would never have grown.’ (Brâiloiu – the quatrain occurs four times in his text, as a refrain.) ↩
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Publication: Saturday, 18 November 2017, at 18:02.
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