Scope and Content
Materials in the Gheorghe and Eugenia Popescu-Judetz Collection span the years 1938 to 1974 and 1995, with the largest portion dating from 1950 to 1972. The collection is arranged into two major groups or series, with a third series which serves as donated supplementary material. Series I, the bulk of the collection, consists of the documentary materials donated by Eugenia Popescu-Judetz in 1990 and 1995, and includes manuscripts, sound recordings, graphic materials, and moving images. Series II consists of material about the collection, primarily generated by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, such as manuscript material, sound recordings, graphic materials, and moving images. Series III contains additional manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera that were donated by Eugenia Popescu-Judetz in 1997.
The Popescu-Judetzes were Romanian dancers who worked primarily as choreographers and teachers. Series I contains the accumulation of decades of Gheorghe's notes, research, and choreographic work as well as examples of Eugenia's dance work and research. It includes at least several thousand notated folk dance variants, more than 3,200 audio-recorded melodies, and approximately 4,000 notated dance melodies. The bulk of the recordings resulted from fieldwork Gheorghe and his team conducted to collect Romanian folk dance and music in all regions of the country. Gheorghe and Eugenia used these materials primarily to create choreographic works for their government-sponsored performance ensembles. They were also used to develop curricula for dance workshops; to publish dance instruction books, to provide methods to teach Romanian character dance, and to record an endangered traditional dance culture. In addition to documenting both traditional Romanian folk dance, and the work of the Ciocîrlia and Perinitza Ensembles, this collection also includes theoretical research, ethnographic descriptions, and a unique dance notation system developed by the Popescu-Judetzs.
All the fieldwork materials are interrelated, though these relationships are not always readily apparent. For example, for each dance variant notated, there probably exists a music of transcription for the accompanying dance tune. There also may be a sound recording of the dance tune or descriptive notes about it in the field notebooks. Furthermore, the dance is probably described on an index card or found on a list created by the Popescu-Judetzs. Although the majority of the dance tunes and dance variants are inventoried, no concordance exists that links them together.
The breadth of materials in this collection demonstrates a progression of scholarly research and performance development and provides insight into dance research and performance in communist Romania. The manuscript materials range from rough field notes describing folk dance variants in various villages to colored diagrams of choreographic works staged for professional performance. Since the dance notations included progress from early field sketches to publication-ready drawings of fully-notated dances, the development of the dance notation system itself is also documented.
Series I
The original collection was donated to the Library of Congress first in 1990, with later donations in 1995 and 2002, in batches that included parts of each subseries of material. Hence, one shipment might contain some music arrangements and notebooks, while another shipment included the rest of the arrangements and notebooks. The inventories for the sound recordings and manuscript materials (such as the dance and music notations) were prepared by Eugenia Popescu-Judetz to accompany each shipment. Since she was able to spend more time on the initial inventories (which included written introductions), the first parts of these documents are more detailed than later addendums.
The field transcriptions of music in this collection are contained in notebooks and on pages of sheet music. The 113 music notebooks are bound, paper volumes that contain holographic scores and sketches of more than 3,000 Romanian dance tunes and songs transcribed in the field between 1949 and 1972. The 40 sets of sheet music (referred to by the donor as "music sheets") are bound and unbound sets of pages that contain more than 250 melodies transcribed between 1950 and 1970. The notebooks and music sheets were used to document songs performed on request in the villages and during on-going events such as festivals. They record the work of the fieldwork team's music transcriber, usually Grigore Suchici (fiddler) but also Constantin Arvinte (composer/music arranger for the Ciocîrlia Ensemble). The transcriber notated the melody played with the dance under study, either on the spot or later by listening to a field recording. Each book and music sheet set contains a number of melodies. Later, under Gheorghe Popescu-Judetz's direction, Arvinte and others used these materials to write arrangements and scores for their ensemble stage performances. In fact, many pages contain notes and references that were added later by Gheorghe.
The 50 musical arrangements in the collection represent compositions that were prepared for performing purposes. They consist of harmonizations, scores, and compositions created by various composers for dance performances of the Ciocîrlia and Perinitza Ensembles, primarily based on fieldwork conducted by the Popescu-Judetzes. Some of the arrangements were used for rehearsals and to teach Romanian folk dances and suites to other dance ensembles.
The notation that documents the Romanian folk dance in this collection is found in the field notebooks and notation files. Gheorghe created this unique system of notation out of his need to record the dances in the field accurately and quickly, at villages, festivals, and competitions. From 1949 to 1955, Gheorghe worked on a system that focused on footwork, including the positions and movements of the passive (non-weight-bearing) foot. The system could be used to make quick notes in the field or notate complete dances. Gheorghe refined the system and used it in his choreography work for the ensemble, published books, and teaching. Eugenia also used the notation for the same purposes and continued to draw on it when teaching and choreographing Romanian folk dance in the United States. After further developing the system, she published Judetz Folk Dance Notation in 1979 (see folder 32).
Gheorghe Popescu-Judetz's 46 field notebooks are rich in dance notation and other information. He used the notebooks, which date between 1950 and 1970, to document his dance research and professional activities. They serve as the primary source of field documentation and provide an insight into his life and creative process. Arranged in random order (some volumes contain multiple years), the notebooks contain a variety of information such as names and addresses of informants; quick sketches of dance notation accompanied by written descriptions; notes from his participation on dance competition juries; notes describing performance groups and dances at folk festivals; sketches of costumes, textile patterns, and motifs; and descriptions of informants documented in photographs. The notebooks also contain information relating to professional ensemble activities, such as dance rehearsal schedules, casting lists, and production notes.
The 33 dance notation "files" (the donor's groupings) contain hundreds of leaves primarily of notation and written descriptions of at least several thousand Romanian folk dance variants, from rough drafts to final forms. They were created by Gheorghe Popescu-Judetz between 1949 and 1972, either in the field or transcribed later, and include camera-ready versions prepared by a cartographer for publication. The dances are grouped mainly by region, and represent field work choreographed for the stage. Of special note are seven files of caluş dance variants, and the staging diagrams for choreographic works Gheorghe created for performing ensembles, predominantly Ciocîrlia.
The dance notation files include materials other than notation. "Nunta la Beleţi," a 26-page, handwritten manuscript, describes a wedding ritual in Beleţi village (Gheorghe's birthplace), Muscel district, as it was performed between 1900 and 1940. Gheorghe formally researched this event between 1960 and 1964. The ethnographic documentation includes descriptions of the participants, costuming, orations, dance, music lyrics, and explanations of the rituals involved. "Mic Dictionar al Jocurilor Populare din Zonele Folclorice Neamt si Bacau" (trans., Small Dictionary of Folk Dances from Neamt in Bacau District) is a 421-page handwritten manuscript. Gheorghe wrote it as part of a larger ethnographic work on the folk arts of the Bicaz-Neamt area, Moldavia, that was never published. Drawn from his 17 years of research, it contains an alphabetically-arranged description of almost 800 dance variants from the area, including type of dance, posture, place, dance name synonyms, accompanying lyrics or chants, etc. The collection also includes graphs, maps, and indexes intended to accompany these dance variants. The last nine files in the series are devoted to Gheorghe's work on the metric and rhythmic analysis of Romanian traditional dance. He theorized that the roots of Romanian dance rhythms share a common origin with classical Greek poetic meters. The files contain classifications of dance rhythms; taxonomic, rhythmic, and metric diagrams; and specific dance examples.
One of Gheorghe Popescu-Judetz's goals was to make a general catalog of all Romanian folk dances and their variants. To that end, with Eugenia's assistance, he drew on the research described above to compile iterations of lists of dances on index cards and paper sheets. Dances listed individually on index cards often include descriptive information. At least 4,000 dances are listed. Some of this material appeared in the glossaries and indexes of his published books.
The sound recordings in Series I were made in the field by Gheorghe and Eugenia Popescu-Judetz between 1950 and 1972. They contain more than 3,200 melodies of Romanian, Turkish, and East Indian folk and traditional music, with some informant interviews. The bulk of the recordings are Romanian dance tunes, songs, and ballads performed by folk musicians, singers, and ensembles from all regions of Romania and Yugoslavian Banat. The collection also includes recordings made by Eugenia of Turkish folk music in Dobrudja, Dervish ceremonies in Anatolia, and samples of folk and classical music in India.
The 118 graphic images in this series are primarily black-and-white photo prints of various sizes and include some collages made of photo prints, drawings, postcards, and text. They are arranged in five groups: fieldwork, Gheorghe Popescu-Judetz and the Ciocîrlia Ensemble, portraits of the Popescu-Judetzes, sketches of the Doiul dance from Banat, and Eugenia Popescu-Judetz. The images span the years 1938 to 1974, with the bulk dating between 1950 and 1970. The collage pages, created by Gheorghe, were taken from scrapbooks he kept to document fieldwork projects, dance competitions, and world dance tours.
The moving images in the collection consist of three short, silent, black-and-white films (two 8 mm and one 16 mm). They provide a glimpse of several dance styles and costuming as well as views of the Romanian countryside.
Series II
Series II consists of materials about the collection generated by the Library of Congress. It contains manuscript material, sound recordings, graphic materials, and video recordings of the March 1995 interviews conducted by Michelle Forner with donor Eugenia Popescu-Judetz. The interviews provide background information on the collection, biographical information about the Popescu-Judetzes, and further insight into the relationships between the materials in the collection.
Series III
Series III consists of additions donated in 1997 to complete the original collection in Series I. Eugenia Popesu-Judetz submitted the remainder of the dance notations collected by her and her husband. The series also contains fieldnotes organized into dance indexes. There are also some materials such as postcards, photographs, publicity pamphlets, and sheet music organized by Eugenia Popescu-Judetz into the category of ephemera.
Series IV
Series IV contains materials donated by Eugenia Popescu-Judetz in 2004 and 2011, and includes field notebooks with dance notation, writings by Eugenia Popescu-Judetz, postcards, index cards with ethnographic notes by the linguist Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu from 1885, and a plaque presented to Eugenia Popescu-Judetz in 1989 in memory of Gheorghe Popescu-Judetz from the Duquesne University Tamburitzans.