Three XIX Century Wallachian Dances in Edward Jones’ Melody Collection

Abstract

In the center of attention of the paper, there are three Wallachian dance melodies in piano transcription, which, together with the music of other peoples, are included in a collection of songs published at the beginning of the 19th century in London. The article focuses on the morphological and syntactic analysis of the musical content, trying to distinguish the facets of the sound discourse, which would prove its belonging to the Romanian musical fund. The radiography, undertaken along the way, at the level of structural elements (motif, phrase, melodic profile) and musical language as a carrier of semantic, cognitive and affective information (intonations, scales, modes, cadences, modulation), aims to mark the specific particularities of the music of the national dance in the perspective of the melodies found in the London collection. The aspects investigated and the conclusions of the study underline the idea of the interest shown for our musical culture of oral tradition and its circulation abroad, which, along with the recognition of its artistic qualities, configures the ethnic specificity rendered through music.