Thread of Humanity: A Conversation with Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri on ‘Transylvanian Dance’

Artists inevitably bring their own perspectives and biases into their interpretation of any work. It is impossible to completely divorce current work from the tinctures of one’s background. A great example is the work of Béla Bartók. Often considered one of the most important composers of the Twentieth Century, Bartók was a founding father of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology. He spent his life dedicated to the presentation of folk music from around the world, from his native Hungary to Turkey. Bartók found great weight in the music of different cultures, even once noting that “Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.” He had a particular affinity for the music of the mountainous bordered region of central Romania known as Transylvania. Perhaps what interested him most was the eclectic influences in the area. Transylvanian music reflects a European cultural melting pot in a region inhabited by Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, Slovaks, Gypsies, and others. While Bartók did his best to faithfully replicate the sounds he heard from the cultures he examined in transcribing folk music, his work was undoubtedly also shaped by his own experiences studying the works of Western composers like Bach, Wagner, Schumann, Brahms, and Strauss. In finding the connections between folk music and Western classical while showing respect to both, Bartók provided a rich framework for Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri, as heard on their latest live recording, Transylvanian Dance (ECM, 2024).

Pianist Ban and violist Maneri have collaborated for over a decade and a half, with the last few years dedicated to exploring a microcosm of Bartók’s thirty-six hundred transcriptions of Transylvanian folk music. The duo treats the composer’s work on each piece with admiration and appreciation but does not feel bound to his written notes. Songs are opened up for moments of improvisatory ingenuity, which allow for the incorporation of not only elements from their backgrounds in jazz and free music but also their shared interest in folk music from around the globe.

The latter is particularly fascinating as the smooth melding of these ideas with traditional Transylvanian folk music suggests a cross-cultural thread that ties all “music of the people.” No matter the barriers between people, humanity and shared emotions transcend it all. Consider, for example, the melancholic “Make Me, Lord, Slim and Tall.” You can almost hear the tears coming off of Maneri’s bow over the desolate background provided by Ban’s keys. Or the soaring up-tempo title track that encapsulates the excitement and physicality of expression through dance. It isn’t easy to pinpoint precisely where the Transylvanian Dance’s music is coming from stylistically. It’s not quite folk music. It’s not quite Western classical music. It’s not quite jazz. Ultimately, it is human music, and that is what makes it so beautiful.

PostGenre: Going back, what first got both of you interested in approaching Bartók’s transcriptions of Transylvanian folk music? Lucian is from Transylvania, but Mat, how did you get into these transcriptions?

Mat Maneri: Well, I didn’t know much about the transcriptions. Lucian really hit me up to them. I knew a little bit about them, and I knew Bartók somewhat, but Lucian got me on board. And once we started going down that rabbit hole, things just got more and more fascinating. As we started researching the transcriptions a bit further – Lucian did a lot of research – and started talking to people about it, we ended up getting access to all these transcripts and wax cylinder recordings that he made. It was a wonderful process. 

PG: So, Lucian, how did you first discover the transcriptions? 

LB: Well, growing up in Transylvania and going to school there, I knew Bartók collected Transylvanian folk songs. The general existence of his transcriptions was common knowledge. But I did not know any of the details, though I did know that Bartók collected in Transylvania. I ended up getting an invite from an organization in Timisoara, a city in Western Transylvania that has been called a European Capital of Culture. Each year, the European Commission names two or three cities throughout Europe as a European Capital of Culture, and Timisoara is one. Anyway, the invite was from someone in an organization there that I used to work with in presenting jazz concerts. I was touring in Europe, and he told me they knew about Bartók’s collection and asked if I wanted to investigate the transcriptions. I said yes, and once I started looking into them, I was put on an extraordinary journey. 

The passion and dedication Bartók had for the music of peasants in Transylvania surpassed everything I knew. And he kept working on the transcriptions until his last months of life. He collected more songs in Transylvania than he did in Hungary or anywhere else. Between 1909 and 1917, he collected close to three thousand six hundred and fifty songs from hundreds of villages and put them on wax cylinders. He called it his life’s work to finish the transcriptions of what he had collected. He advocated for it, and it was published after his death in 1945. 

The monumental posthumously released work was called ‘Rumanian Folk Music’ and consisted of five volumes. Each volume was six hundred pages. It’s an extraordinary repository. As we know, Bartók was one of the founders of ethnomusicology and field recordings. Alan Lomax was undeniably influenced by him, as were others who made field recordings at the end of the Nineteenth and beginning of the Twentieth Century.  

Once I dug into Bartók’s transcriptions, I immediately invited Mat to perform some of them with me, and it has proved, over all these years, to be a fascinating thing for us. The more we got into the transcriptions, the more we realized how amazing these songs are and how much they can teach us. They also easily lend themselves to improvisation. 

And then, of course, the chance to work with John Surman in the first installment [Transylvanian Folk Songs (Sunnyside, 2020)] was a life’s dream come true. Mat and I both immediately thought of John for the music. Then the pandemic came, and Mat and I continued as a duet when we recorded this album for ECM. There’s another project with the quartet with John Surman and Brad Jones that we did last year. But yeah, that’s how it all came about. It was a bigger project than I imagined, and it still is. But it makes sense it would be so large because the work that Bartók put into the transcriptions is truly extraordinary. 

PG: Because Bartók transcribed so many songs, what is your process for selecting which pieces to perform?

MM: It’s a little bit random. We divided the transcriptions into different sections, whether a violin-focused piece, a Christmas song, a vocal piece, or whatever. We divided the songs into stacks based on these categories, and then we each tackled a stack to go through and see what spoke to us the most in each pile. 

LB: Yes, there’s an element of randomness because there are so many transcriptions. Too many to go through everything. I don’t think we went through more than a hundred and fifty. No, maybe up to two hundred and fifty. 

MM: No more than that, for sure.

LB: So, two hundred and fifty out of thirty-six hundred. We went through a very small amount of the total number of transcriptions. 

MM: Yeah, there’s just too much material to work with. There’s so much of it. 

PG: But once you select a piece, how do you determine where you should or should not open it up to improvisation?

MM: That’s a good question. The use of improvisation depends heavily on the style of the tune and on how we arrange it. Some tunes are arranged in a way where you want to start improvising right away. Some tunes just want to linger on their own because they’re so perfect. It depends on the arrangement, how it strikes you, and what you do with it. 

We did one tune with John Surman that was a little Christmas Carol. We all played the same melody at different time speeds, and that’s all it was. But then it was immediately improvised on in a very simple way. But with just the two of us, we get to the melody right away, hold onto it, and gradually pull away from it. It all depends on the tune and how you want to approach it. 

LB: Yes, Mat is right. If I were to add anything to that, it is that we used different devices. For example, in our duo, Mat’s sound and concept are so important because he incorporates a lot of techniques that I haven’t heard any other viola or violin players use. He incorporates a lot of microtonal stuff and techniques from all over the world. At one point, I told him that he sounded like a Romanian Gypsy fiddle player, but he told me he was actually using a Korean technique or some Arabian stuff. All of those things are part of his arsenal of playing the viola in a truly unique way. 

We were very free in terms of how we looked at things. For certain tunes, I would take motifs from the songs and then interpret them with motifs that I wrote that were influenced by my love of Paul Bley, for example. For other tunes, we just found a nice groove and then used the melodies from the Bartók transcription. Mat would expand on it, and it would become a new tune. Also, because we’ve been playing this on the road for the last four years, they have become new tunes completely. Spending more time with the songs and letting us take them to different places. 

Pretty soon, we will also release a live album with John Surman. The music has become so different from the original album we did with him. That happened with the duo as well. There’s so much intimacy when Mat and I play. There’s a certain chemistry there. We can just start playing and in a split second, change and do things differently. One catches the other one. The material at hand almost doesn’t even matter. But these folk songs are so beautiful, and they can teach us so much. It’s an extraordinary thing to listen to voices and people playing instruments from more than a hundred years ago. The language has changed. The music has changed.  The folk music of Transylvania from the last decade does not sound at all like what you would hear on those wax cylinders. 

When I listen to the cylinders, I feel like I’m entering a lost world that can show me so many things. And when we approach them, a lot of our jazz experience and experiences with improvised music come into play. We bring everything to the table. Grooves. Non-grooves. Ideas. Emotions. All the people that influenced us and all of those things we took from them are thrown at these songs, and when you have musicians like Mat or John, it makes it so much easier to do so. 

PG: It may be difficult to tell, but as you have gone through the Bartók transcriptions, have you gotten a sense of how accurate they are? Do you feel he took some liberties in certain places? 

MM: Well, it’s fascinating because he tried to be as precise as humanly possible. But a lot of the music was made by the human voice, which can be so loose. He’s writing these intricate time signatures and things to try to capture the freedom that voice has. It’s so expressive. So, in some ways, the transcriptions are very accurate. But, in other ways, you can never really write them down. It’s an oral tradition. I think Bartók did about as well as you can with this material, but some of it’s so expressive and rhythmically almost impossible to notate. 

LB: That’s the same thing as with jazz, in a way. We have to remember that Bartók made these transcriptions at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, a time when they did not have a modern methodology for approaching the transcription of folk music that is so free and loose that they don’t care about bar measures and bar lines. When Bartók did these transcriptions, he wasn’t the only one. I mean, he did it with [Zoltán] Kodály, and they did not have the tools they needed. 

Even Bartók changed his methodology. For example, the trunks of notebooks he brought when he moved to America in 1940 were the Romanian ones. They’re at Columbia University because he got a stipend from the university to work on them. They’re now housed in the special rare collection manuscripts at Columbia’s library. After he moved to New York, Bartók lived another five years, and continued to work on transcribing Transylvanian folk music. Even in his last month of life, he was corresponding with a Romanian priest in Chicago to correctly get down some regional wording. 

What we do know today about Bartók is that his compositions were forever changed by his folk research. There have been serious studies documenting how Bartók changed in the way he composed in those years, and he was heavily influenced by his folk research in Transylvania, Slovakia, and Hungary. Also, a little by the work he did in Turkey and North Africa. But for Turkey and North Africa, he transcribed about a hundred songs. Turkey, a hundred and fifty. Hungary, twenty-seven hundred. Slovakia, twenty-one hundred. Transylvania, over thirty-six hundred. These are the numbers. So, the influence of Transylvanian music in those later years was particularly large.

PG: Earlier, you mentioned how Mat pulls musical ideas from all different cultures – Arabian and Korean traditional music for two. Mat, was it a conscious choice from the get-go to borrow from those cultures, or do you pull things that sound like they would fit well together and only later recognize the culture from which you are borrowing?

MM: Well, Bartók put it very well in his own notes. He had listened to and studied music from all over the world. Although music from different cultures sounds very different, there is a common undeniable thread through folk music that is tied to human expression. And because of that, something from Turkey may sound similar to something from Hungary or West Africa. Actually, when we were listening to some of the wax cylinders of singers in Transylvania, my first thought was that they sounded West African because of certain melodies but also used an Arabic kind of tonality. Ultimately, there is a thread that connects all folk music, whether Greek, Celtic, Japanese, or whatever. You can find these connections from so many different parts of the world, yet at the same time, their music sounds very, very different. So when we’re playing these songs, and something reminds me of something from a particular culture, I incorporate a little of it into my playing. As Bartók noted, there’s a human connection between all these musics that you can detect and there’s a tangibility to that. 

PG: Transylvanian Dance is a live recording. Do you feel like there’s something about it being live that would have been lost in the studio?

MM: This music lends itself towards communication. There’s something very communicative about it. Studio sessions tend to be less communicative. In the studio, you are focused less on communication and more on trying to get something specific across. There’s a certain kind of aesthetic that I love about studio sessions. But when you’re playing these kinds of melodies, which are so emotive towards the human condition, it greatly helps to have that human connection with an audience. 

This music goes back hundreds of years and has been passed down by vocal traditions without writing. No matter how out we take the music and improvise on it, maybe even in a very different, almost free, way, there’s still that core of the melody that wants to be spoken to another human being. And having an audience helps with that. 

LB: I agree with Mat. Both Transylvanian Folk Songs and Transylvanian Dance were live recordings. In both cases, the day before each concert, we recorded the whole material as a run-through rehearsal. So, we have double sessions for each album, the runthrough and the concert. In both cases, we released the live performance even though it might be more technically challenging to do so than the one without an audience. We go with the live recordings because there’s something magic about the emotion, intensity, and adrenaline that you get from people witnessing what you’re doing. 

Some things happen only when you are playing live. As an example, the end of the song “Transylvanian Dance” went in a completely different direction than we had initially intended. Live, it turned into something else.

PG: In terms of communication, it is not only that between you and the audience but between the two of you, as well. You have been working together for fifteen years. How do you feel your communication has changed and developed over that period? 

MM: Weirdly enough, our ability to communicate with one another started so strong. Of course, it’s gotten better over the years as we’ve developed and broadened. But it came from such a strong base. We’ve told the story many times, but the first time we played together, we hardly knew each other. Lucian hired me at the last minute to be in his large group doing the music of George Enescu. One of the pieces that we didn’t have time to rehearse was an opening to one of the tunes, which was a violin and piano duet. We did it for the first time live in front of a large audience in an opera hall. It was a beautiful space, and we approached the piece with no notes and no direction. Afterward, we looked at each other and just knew we had something. There was clearly a connection between us. 

So, we naturally started from a very strong place of communication. It’s been great to have fifteen years of being able to work on music and develop it together. Of course, the music grows and grows as we continue to play gigs and tour. 

LB: Mat is correct. As we have continued to work together, our trust in one another has only increased. We became friends and have toured together literally all over the world. Hundreds and hundreds of concerts. It’s been a wonderful journey. 

‘Transylvanian Dance’ will be released on ECM Records on August 30, 2024. The album can be purchased from the label’s website. More information on Lucian Ban can be found on his website and more on Mat Maneri can be found on ECM’s site. The duo will be touring throughout the US in September and October 2024.

Photo credit: Mircea Albutiu