Târgul (2019) for vioara cu goarna and electronics [10:00] <a href="https://newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/horizontal-drift">Horizontal Drift by Christopher Trapani</a> Târgul has multiple meanings in Romanian: a market, a fair, or an agreement. It’s a word I encountered when traveling to the târgul in Negreni, a Transylvanian town west of Cluj-Napoca that holds an annual antiques market: thousands of stands with all kinds of wares that, in October 2015 at least, were soaked by a relentless drizzle. I traveled there as a sort of pilgrimage, to visit the atelier of vioara- maker Dorel Codoban in the nearby village of Lazuri, and was startled to learn that violinist Max Haft had made a similar trip not long before. It made sense that our shared affinity for the unusual instrument should lead to a collaboration: Târgul was commissioned by Ensemble Contrechamps, and premiered in October 2019 in Geneva. The vioara cu goarna (“violin with horn” in Romanian) is a folk instrument from Western Romania modeled on the stroh violin, the horn violin developed in the early 20th century to help bowed strings to project for phonographic recordings. In lieu of the typical rounded body, the vioara cu goarna projects via a phonograph mechanism under the bridge using a disc made from stamped tin, through a horn—in this case, a modified bugle from a communist scout troop. Widely played in the Bihor region of Western Romania, the instrument has caught on to the point of being adopted as the emblem of the local football team, and has even made it onto a Romanian postage stamp. The sonic hallmark of the vioara cu goarna is its brash, highly directional, scratchy sound; for a matching color, the electronics are played through megaphones at the far sides of the stage. A total of three low-fi horns spit out sound at right angles. Aside from one field recording from Negreni that surfaces in the final minutes of Târgul—two fiddlers playing a unison melody, accompanied by a small marching bass drum with a warped metal disc for a cymbal attached—all of the electronics are made by chopping and looping the real-time signal, for concatenative synthesis using CataRT and MuBu in Max. Târgul was written for Maximilian Haft and premiered on October 15, 2019 in Geneva.