Musician Village - Pârâu de Pripor

Pârâu de Pripor is a village where the majority of inhabitants are professional musicians. It is inhabited by several families: Argint, Călău, Enoiu, Muscurici, Pobirci, Rap, Zlătaru. Musicians sometimes switch instruments depending on the situation: for example, at the main table of weddings, the accordionist or another instrumentalist stays for the entire night in front of the organ, whose memory includes the timbres and accompaniment formulas of instruments from older times: guitar, viola and bass. Most families in the village are related by blood or alliance. Each of them has formed its own taraf, which it restricts or - for larger parties - expands by co-opting musicians from other families.

The relationships of kinship and profession are conjugated and re-conjugated, according to always changing formulas, enveloping the village in a mesh of alliances and rivalries (each family's taraf tries to attract clients, to the detriment of the others), of friendships and enmities (often linked to the sharing of money from tips), of availability and unavailability of cooperation. A village of lăutari - such as Pârâu de Pripor - is always and anywhere in Romania the place where you can find the best folk musicians in the region; and the place where music renews itself most radically, but at the same time preserves, with surprising faithfulness, layers of great antiquity.

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