Transylvania has long been associated with its most famous fictional character, Dracula. But pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri challenge that stereotype with their Transylvanian Dance project.
Based on Hungarian composer Béla Bartók's field recordings and research of Transylvanian folk dance music from the early 20th century, the duo combines live performance, rare archival footage, audio from Bartók's original wax cylinder recordings, and more to create a unique immersive experience. The project started when Lucian Ban, who is from Transylvania, discovered he lived a few miles from where Bartók collected the folk songs:
"It's still today the biggest folk collection done by one person. So for me to discover that as somebody who's from there was really powerful," he said.
A Romanian jazz festival commissioned Ban, along with Mat Maneri, to create the Transylvanian Dance project in 2013, which they've been working on in one form or another since.
They'll be performing at the Sandbox in Sand City on Oct. 10. They joined KAZU's Dylan Music in the Green Room ahead of the performance.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What people can expect if they come to see Transylvanian Dances:
Lucian Ban (LB): We reimagine the music using jazz and improvisation. We do use Bartók archives. We have very rare and some of the earliest video footage of dancers. So this is all integrated in a sort of an immersive experience where we play and improvise starting from some of the wax cylinders that the audience gets to hear.
Dylan Music (DM): I actually just went back and listened to some of those wax cylinder recordings, and they have kind of this quaint and haunting quality, maybe because of the fuzzy warped recording sound of the wax cylinders.
One thing I was wondering before I heard it was, would there be vocals? There are some kind of like 'joyful yelling' in some of the songs. Do you think you infuse some of that vocalization into your own interpretation of the songs at all?
Mat Maneri (MM): The vocalization really kind of attunes to what I like to do, which is microtonal music, kind of bending the pitch. Because they weren't singing with a piano. They were just kind of singing these melodies. So there's a lot of different intonations that I get to explore because of the vocalizations.
Maneri and Ban's on how they create their unique sound:
DM: On your album Transylvanian Dance, the music itself seems to be such an amalgamation of sounds. We hear some jazz, classical, experimental, improvisational, and almost kind of buried there, or I guess maybe 'dug up from the past', you can hear the bare bones or the outline of this very distinct sound of Eastern European traditional folk music.
I'm thinking particularly here of the "Dowry Song." So how does a song like that come together for you guys?
LB: We discovered over years of touring and presenting this music every night when we are on the road — and every night is different— that we can bring different traditions, musical traditions, to songs from Transylvania that were recorded by Bartók. We bring African influences. We can bring the blues, of course. Mat brings techniques on viola from India, from Korea. I play the piano a lot with extended techniques, like muting the strings of the piano to sort of imitate an African instrument, or a cymbal, or a dulcimer. So this was kind of a discovery for us, and we think it's a profound one.
Lucian Ban on what the Transylvanian people who performed these folk dance songs were like:
LB: Transylvania is not a monolith. So you have Romanians, you have Hungarians, you have Jewish, you have Roma people, Ukrainians, and all of these [people] lived in Transylvania.
It's such a powerful thing that we get to hear how humanity was back then. Because some of the things that define us are truly the same. Pain, sorrow, love, missing someone, joy.
It's something that moved me and Mat to investigate and go deeper into these songs.
Pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri will be going deeper into these folk songs in the immersive program "Transylvanian Dances" at the Sandbox in Sand City on Saturday, Oct. 10.