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A Sea of Stars and Strings
By Savannah Brown,
2026-02-19On Feb. 24, at Aasen-Hull Hall on the University of Oregon campus, experience fiddle music like you’ve never heard before as Zoë Aqua’s Transylvanian String Band embarks on their first-ever US tour, Crossing a Sea of Stars — named for their 2024 live album A Sea of Stars, which was recorded in a variety of Transylvanian synagogues. Coming from a devout Jewish upbringing in Colorado, Aqua is a violinist and lifelong student of klezmer, the traditional folk music of the Ashkenazi Jewish people of Central and Eastern Europe. While studying music in Brooklyn, New York, she was introduced to the deep rhythmic grooves of Transylvanian folk. The experience motivated her to earn a Fulbright scholarship to move to Transylvania, Romania and study the region’s folk music from 2021 to 2023. What resulted is Zoë Aqua’s Transylvanian String Band, which member Gergely Réman describes as “klezmer melodies with Transylvania sound.” This combination comes easily for the four-piece ensemble (where Aqua is the only American and the other three are local to Transylvania), because despite their different styles, “both of these musics are mainly dance music, so it has a real function, not just listening music,” upright bass player Károly Dénes says. Aqua says that she’s most looking forward to introducing Americans to instruments that they’ve likely never seen before, such as the cimbalom (essentially a very large and very old dulcimer) and the brácsa (a three-string viola with a flat bridge). The performance will be accompanied by an educational presentation on these instruments and how the group blends the two genres. Aqua says that if “people like fiddle music in general, then I think they’re probably going to like this.”
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