Zamfir discovered prayer in the pan flute
Legendary player 'found true mystic, diving powers' in the instrument
Lloyd Dykk, Vancouver Sun. Published: Saturday, January 21, 2006
Zamfir, the one-named legend of the pan flute, returns to Vancouver on Jan. 27 for his last show in a seven-city tour of Canada.
One night is a far cry from those legendary seven that he sold out in the 1980s, the last time he came to the city and played with the Vancouver Symphony at the Orpheum.
It was a record that he still remembers and it was a memorable time as well for some members of the orchestra. They were hauled in before management and chastised for tittering. This was while Zamfir was playing his own music (he's a composer too, having written some 300 works).
It was very naughty of them to interrupt the spell of those transcendental sounds coming from the man with the flowing shoulder-length curls. As recalled by one of those musicians: "It was during the solo encores, which got longer and longer each night and funnier and funnier. One snort and we were off."
It must have been like laughing in church. For the rest of that run stage lights were kept very low.
It was hard arranging an interview with Gheorghe Zamfir, who was somewhere in Europe, speaks limited English and is apparently computer-unfriendly. Questions had to be e-mailed to his agent and translated. His answers, which we were promised by Dec. 29, came in on Jan. 3 which is how long it took to find a translator who could convert his handwritten responses to English and e-mail them back. Maria Bandol, certified translator, did the best she could but threw her hands up by the last of the three pages, pronouncing it indecipherable.
But we know this much. Zamfir, born in 1941, learned to play gypsy songs on the accordion while attending his family's goat herd. He then studied piano and conducting at the Conservatory of Bucharest and conducted the Ciocarlia (or, Skylark), a Romanian folklore ensemble.
He was exiled from the country in 1982 for violating Nicolae Ceausescu's communist doctrine by publicly dedicating his music to God and fled to Montreal where he lived for nearly a decade, going back in 1990 only to face more harassment from the new Romanian president, Ion Iliescu, another dark figure accused of crimes against humanity and abuse of power.
Zamfir makes his own pan flutes, tuning them with beeswax, was received by the Pope three times and has 90 gold and platinum records. He also plays classical music, a favourite being Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
We didn't know that the pan flute was the national instrument of Romania, Colombia, Peru and Greece. It's an ancient instrument, no?, we asked.
"The [type of] pan pipe that I normally play is typically Romanian and it is 7,000 years old. According to the latest research as well as to the theory I presented in my doctoral thesis on this very topic, the Greek god Pan himself is the mythological creator of the very first pan pipe (hence the name of the instrument) and is originally from Tracia, so his origins were Romanian from the southern part of the Balkan Mountains, same as Dionysos, Apollo and Osiris. In Columbia and Peru, the pan flute is known under a different name: sikus or zamponia, and is a pastoral instrument just like in Romania. God Pan himself was the god of forests and mountains."
The pan flute has a mysterious, somewhat mystical appeal. Is that what drew you to the instrument? Can you explain its mystique or say anything about it?
"The pan flute was never a mystic instrument. It was always used ... as part of folk traditions. It was in 1972 that I made it known all over the world, and in 1978 I discovered the prayer in the pan flute along with the organ and I found true mystic, divine powers in it. The pan flute was in fact the first instrument ever and it always represented Mother Nature, while god Pan was the first player who played it in 'stereo,' across the valleys and over the mountains."
Recalling that last time in Vancouver,
"I did indeed perform in seven concerts in one single week in Vancouver back in 1984, and the concerts were sold out -- a record that nobody matched, neither before, nor after that. Since then I have never again equalled that success except for the concert I performed in the city of Ephesus [Turkey] in 1999 where I played with the symphonic orchestra of Izmir in front of an audience of 25,000 people plus 5,000 more people who had no seats, so in all the audience counted 30,000 people."
Zamfir has an enviable self-image (say, next to the relatively humble Yehudi Menuhin), describing himself as "one of Romania's most glorious artists of all times" (so much for George Enescu and others):
"I am not giving credit to any pan flute player except for my 10 students from the National University of Music of Bucharest. That was a class I initiated in 2001 but it was abusively disassembled in 2004 by the university chancellor Dan Buciu and the dean Serban Soreanu from both jealousy and hatred but also for political reasons.
"It was a criminal act, and I would compare this to an attempt to make disappear the saxophone and the trumpet in U.S.A.
"In 1970, for the first time, I performed in 45 concerts at the Theatre du Vieux Colombier and from there on I conquered the entire planet. At that time I was the only pan flute player. After my undeniable success in Europe as well as the entire world, tens and hundreds of amateur pan flute players imitated me in both playing and in crafting the pan flute.
"Today there are about 2,000 pan flute players around the world who are making big business of the pan flute and the concerts altogether. Unfortunately, none of them has ever reached a high level nor have they understood the divine, purifying meaning of the pan flute. They merely deformed the pure sound of the instrument treating it as business by trying to imitate me ('I am going to be just like Zamfir'), but this never happened.
"It's a long way from the empirical, ordinary sound to the divine originating one. One needs to be a real musician, philosopher, poet, and Christian to be able to understand the entire universal alchemy of the pan flute as it represents a universal, planetary sound at the galactic level."
It now seemed a bit anticlimactic to discuss the technicalities of how Zamfir improved the pan flute but:
"In 1968 I had the idea of transforming the pan flute because the traditional one featuring 21 tubes had become unsatisfactory for my needs of expressing my feelings and inspiration. I gradually added two, three, four, five, eight and 10 tubes in the lower pitch range and this was a new beginning of the modern pan flute which was a world premiere. It had everything: soprano, alto, tenor, bass and contrabass, all in one, and then I created the giant pan flute -- 42 tubes, 135 centimetres high, 120 centimetres wide.
"I am currently working on a 52-tube pan flute, much bigger than the giant one. All these inventions allowed me to get to know all musical styles -- from the church music to the chamber music, modern genres, vocal sonorities, folk music -- I played everything, no matter how complex. I also tried jazz and rock, although I am not very fond of this latter style."
A few words about his persecution:
"When I came back from the exile in 1990 after having long suffered because of the Ceausescu regime, I lived an inferno-like nightmare. This time it was all because of [former president] Ion Iliescu who played a mysterious role and proved to be the most malefic and negative Romanian political figure for the past 50 years of communism."
Amidst the shadows, one thing is certain. This time through Vancouver, Zamfir's musical activities won't be threatened by any snickering by VSO members. He's bringing his own string quintet to play, in addition to the Four Seasons, "jazz standards and well-known favourites."
