Archive for Eastern European music
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Archive for Eastern European Music
Sources and research
This archive collects music and music publications from all over Eastern Europe, but also sound recordings, books, magazines, electronic media and provides extensive material for scientific analysis in the form of concert programmes and other documents.
A special focus of the archive is the collection of Romanian music. The holdings include the entire published works of George Enescu (1881-1955) in scores and recordings as well as almost all of the works of Anatol Vieru (1926-1998), Pascal Bentoiu (1927-2016), Ştefan Niculescu (1927-2008), Tiberiu Olah (1928-2002), Myriam Marbe (1931-1997) and Aurel Stroe (1932-2008). Publications by Romanian musicologists from the 19th century onwards round off the collections of the Oldenburg archive.
More
In addition to anthologies and monographs, this series also includes translations of key texts in order to provide researchers with materials for analysing this music. Standard literature on the music of important composers, the traditional folk music of Eastern Europe and traditional instruments or Byzantine music can thus be made accessible to a wider public - and offer contributions to current discourses in musicology and cultural studies: From which cultural-historical contexts can works by Eastern European composers be analysed? Which music-theoretical vocabulary enables an appropriate language of analysis? What significance and what influence did the study of European concert music have on Romanian composers? Which aspects of individual musical works allow new listening experiences for an audience that is not very familiar with Eastern European traditions? How can an adequate reception be achieved?
Editors: Violeta Dinescu, Michael Heinemann
Archive for Eastern European music
Women composers from Romania
Violeta Dinescu, Michael Heinemann, Roberto Reale (eds.)
Archive for Eastern European Music, 8
University of Oldenburg Press (UOLP), 2025
ISBN 978-3-8142-2420-6
The printing of 300 copies of this book was made possible by generous funding from the Mariann Steegmann Foundation for the Promotion of Women in Music and the Arts.
Abstract
Things are different in Romania. The number of women composers active today is immediately apparent from concert programmes. Music by women does not have to be made "visible" first. It needs no explicit advocacy, it needs no safe spaces. The times in which aesthetic discourse was also a function of the gender of the performers are over in Romania.
There are reasons for this.
The fact that women were able to participate more easily in all areas of life in socialist countries is certainly a prerequisite for equal participation in the arts and sciences that should not be underestimated. However, this is at best a sufficient condition. It is probably much more important that the parameters of a guiding aesthetic discourse in Romania opened up greater interpretative perspectives than in other countries, where the discourse was narrower (and stricter), limited to questions of material, technique and craftsmanship: concepts that invite rationalisation but encourage less spontaneity. And the body, which makes and experiences music, then becomes a subordinate entity. But the reference to tradition and history is also more unbiased in Romania. It is not difficult to relate to history, to forms of autochthonous music-making in ritual, liturgy and socialising. Ethos and rhythm, modes and metres are building blocks that can simply be adapted, but which also allow for diverse developments.
Elements of lamentation in George Enescu's opera OEdipe
Roberto Reale
Archive for Eastern European Music, 7
BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg 2022
ISBN 978-3-8142-2404-6
Abstract
Death and the knowledge of mortality was and is a cultural generator of the first order; not only because it repeatedly challenges people to transcend the boundaries of the self and the time of life through the culturally relevant part of our actions (art, science, philosophy, etc.),5 but also because this knowledge per se continually stimulates a (cultural) confrontation with the finiteness of human life itself. The knowledge of mortality opens up a broad field of directly or indirectly related questions that can become the subject of cultural debate. These can be, for example, questions about the fatefulness of human life or about the origin of suffering and the associated questions about how people can deal with them. It is these questions, among others, that Sophocles addresses in the tragedy Oedipus the King as well as in the entire Theban Trilogy. By taking up the myth of Oedipus and using the tragedies Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus as the subject of his opera OEdipe, which premiered in 1936, the Romanian composer George Enescu confronts the challenges posed by these questions and finds his own answers. The compositional means used by Enescu to realise his interpretation of the tragedy and the significance of the phenomenon of lamentation - especially musically expressed forms of lamentation - are the subject of this volume.
Myriam Marbe
Violeta Dinescu, Michael Heinemann, Roberto Reale (eds.)
Archive for Eastern European Music, 6
BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg 2022
ISBN 978-3-8142-2393-3
Abstract
Myriam Marbe is an outstanding personality and a central figure in Romanian music in the second half of the 20th century. Her artistic work visualises the necessity of creativity and writing in order to "be able to live". (Karl Jaspers). Myriam Marbe was one of those creative personalities who did not display their talent lightly or with ostentation. Her compositions bear witness to a thoroughly human attitude with which she musically reflects the deep levels of our existence. Her music can be complex and highly intricate when the context of the whole demands it. But her music can also be almost hieratic, simple and archaic if the musical gesture makes this necessary. At the same time, Marbe has not only continuously and profoundly preserved the heritage of Romanian culture, but has also consciously perceived a wide range of different musical cultures and responded to them with convincing creativity.
Enescu in context
Violeta Dinescu, Michael Heinemann, Roberto Reale (eds.)
Archive for Eastern European Music, 5
BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg 2019
ISBN 978-3-8142-2379-7
Abstract
In Romanian music, there is a time before Enescu and a time after Enescu. As a composer and performer, he has influenced generations of Romanian composers and musicians and continues to do so today. This 5th volume in the Archive for Eastern European Music - Sources and Research series is the first German-language publication to bring together musicological contributions on Enescu's music and his person. Included are essays from the first ZwischenZeiten symposium in 2006, which was dedicated to Enescu, as well as contributions from the ZwischenZeiten symposia of the following years, in which references to Enescu's oeuvre were repeatedly made.
Space in music
Martin Kowalewski
Archive for Eastern European Music, 4
BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg 2018
ISBN 978-3-8142-2308-7
Abstract
Superficially, we can perceive objects in space with our eyes and sounds in time with our ears, because objects present themselves in space and sounds in time, but this is not the whole truth, because with our eyes we also perceive movements of objects in time and with our ears we localise sounds in space. A further consideration shows that without objects and without sounds, we cannot perceive space as such or time as such with our eyes and ears. If the space around us were completely empty and we could not see ourselves, we would not be able to perceive space, and if nothing moved and there were no sounds or noises, we would not be able to perceive time either. This shows that we have to deal with objects and sounds in order to talk about their spatiality and time. In addition, a single motionless object or a single unending sound could also convey space or time to us. Two things follow from this: firstly, that we must consider objects and their movements and sounds and their duration in order to be able to grasp space and time with our two distance senses, and secondly, that we must include several objects and sounds in the investigation.
Pascal Bentoiu
Violeta Dinescu, Michael Heinemann, Eva-Maria Houben, Roberto Reale (eds.)
Archive for Eastern European Music, 3
BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg 2015
ISBN 978-3-8142-2332-2
Abstract
Pascal Bentoiu is a musician with a sharp mind and uncompromising integrity who has achieved recognition far beyond the borders of Romania. Even during the communist era, he went his own way despite reprisals. After the fall of the regime, he became the first president of the Romanian Composers' Association (1990). Bentoiu's works are characterised by the versatility of their stylistic and technical elements. His operas, instrumental and orchestral works are characterised by colour, drama and lyricism. In numerous writings, he addressed philosophical, ethnomusicological, music-aesthetic and music-theoretical questions. This book brings together the lectures given at the symposium "Between Times", which was dedicated to Pascal Bentoiu and entitled "Composing under Suspicion" in 2007, as well as supplementary analyses, interpretations, portrait sketches and thoughts on reception. It also contains a number of essays by the composer himself - on music and musicians as well as his own work - and a complete catalogue raisonné with discography.
The Doina - An introduction to the
lyrical singing of Romania
Vincent Rastädter
Archive for Eastern European Music, 2
BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg 2015
SBN 978-3-8142-2308-7
Abstract
The tradition of the "doina" goes back a long way. Describing the 'doina' as a lament or as an (instrumental) song of mourning falls short of the mark. On the one hand, the doina can be described in its free, unbound form as an expression of the soul of Romanian music, but at the same time it is also a human attitude: the attitude of someone who is perhaps in mourning, full of courage and strength. "Doina" also means a certain kind of improvisation, spontaneous music-making that is guided by listening and releases sounds as calls into the vastness of space. The present study endeavours to define the doina in the context of Romanian music and to describe the developments from the beginnings, which cannot be clearly established, to the present day. Analytical, historical and ethnological approaches are used to trace a musical form that has been less an expression of communal life in public than of personal, private experiences.
Stefan Niculescu
Violeta Dinescu, Eva-Maria Houben, Michael Heinemann (eds.)
with the collaboration of Roberto Reale
BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg 2013
ISBN 978-3-8142-2281-3
Abstract
This first volume in the Archive for Eastern European Music series on Stefan Niculescu presents a composer of the generations after George Enescu: With a wide-ranging interest in the arts and sciences as well as philosophy, he observed the various trends of his time and drew inspiration for his work from them. Niculescu appears not only as a composer, but also as a teacher. The book grew out of the symposium Zwischen den Zeiten (Oldenburg 2007) and the Composers' Colloquium (Oldenburg 2006) and presents essays and statements by the composer, translated and published here for the first time in German, alongside scholarly analyses of Niculescu's works. The publication also offers the first complete catalogue raisonné as well as commentaries on his works, interviews and reminiscences by pupils and colleagues.